Please Help! Crawl & Site Errors - Will This Impact My SEO?
-
Hello Moz,
I need urgent help. I remove a tonne of product pages and put everything into one product page to deal with duplicate content. I thought this was a good thing to do until I got an email from Google saying:
"Googlebot identified a significant increase in the number of URLs on ****.com that return a 404 (not found) error. "
I checked it out and found the problem:
4 Soft 404's
41 Not Found'sWhat do I need to do to fix this? Is it a problem or should I just ignore? I removed all the pages on WordPress but I need to do it somehow manually through Google?
I have worked so hard on my SERP's that this will destroy me if I'm penalised. Please can someone advise?
-
First of all - don't stress out! You won't be penalized for broken links. Google penalizes for shady behavior, not honest mistakes.
Like Andrew said, make sure that you aren't linking to any of the pages you removed from your site, and that you've removed them from your XML sitemap.
Then you should be good!
Good luck,
Kristina
-
Don't stress everything is OK.
When google indexes your site it makes its own URL list. 404s in search console are just google saying 'hey I checked for this page from my list and it's gone'
Well that's fine. You deleted it so you already know it's gone. Google will keep checling for this page a few more times then it will deindex it. It just doesn't want to deindex without fair warning.
If these pages are still getting traffic however I would 301 them to a relevant page to maintain user experience.
Finally, if these pages targeted keywords you want to rank for. You will loose these rankings if you don't target them elsewhere.
-
I do yes but I must know how to deal with Google now as I am so stressed!
I thought deleting the pages would be fine? I don't understand what further I must do? Once you delete a page must you tell Google you have done so?
I only got the email yesterday so I assume I have sometime left to fix?
-
Do you have a decent 404 page? Does this facilitate further browsing.
Internal links that 404 will leak page rank. So you need to fix any internal 404s. Google says 404s in search console are not damaging but many people including myself see traffic bumps from resolving these with a 301.
Have you seen any drop in traffic or rankings.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
"Moz encountered an error on one or more pages on your site" Error
I have been receiving this error for a while: "Moz encountered an error on one or more pages on your site" It's a Multi-Lingual Wordpress website, the robots.txt is set to allow crawlers on all links and I have followed the same process for other website I've done yet I'm receiving this error for this site.
Technical SEO | | JustinZimri0 -
Is there a way to see Crawl Errors older than 90 days in Webmaster Tools?
I had some big errors show up in November, but I can't see them anymore as the history only goes back 90 days. Is there a way to change the dates in Webmaster Tools? If not, is there another place I'd be able to get this information? We migrated our hosting to a new company around this time and the agency that handled it for us never downloaded a copy of all the redirects that were set-up on the old site.
Technical SEO | | b4cab0 -
Manual Webspam Error. Same Penalty on all sites on Webmaster Tools account.
My URL is: www.ebuzznet.comToday when i checked webmaster tools under manual spam section. I got Manual spam and reason was Thin content with little or no added value. Then I checked other sites from same webmaster tools account, there are 11 sites, all of them received same manual action. I never received any mail, no notification on site messages section regarding this manual action. I just need confirmation whether it is something to do with any error in webmaster tools or all of the sites really received manual spam actions.Most of the article on sites are above 500 words, quality content (no spun or copied).Looking for suggestions, answers
Technical SEO | | ndroidgalaxy0 -
Seo and ssl error (Error code: sec_error_revoked_certificate)
Hi. An error occurred during a connection to esta-register.org. Peer's Certificate has been revoked. (Error code: sec_error_revoked_certificate) ** i want to know this error can be effected on seo or not?** esta
Technical SEO | | vahidafshari450 -
Will SEO Moz index our keywords if the site is ALL https?
We have a site coming into beta next week. Playing around with SEO Moz, I had trouble getting the keywords to rank at all. Was this because the site is entirely https? If yes, what else can SEO Moz NOT do if the site is all https? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
Cloud Hostings & SEO Effects
Is there any negative to cloud hosting? I believe they share the same IP addresses but is it true you can still get banned if someone else on a shared IP or server does some spam?
Technical SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Pros & Cons of deindexing a site prior to launch of a new site on the same domain.
If you were launching a new website to completely replace an older existing site on the same domain, would there be any value in temporarily deindexing the old site prior to launching the new site? Both have roughly 3000 pages, will launch on the same domain but have a completely new url structure and much better optimized for the web. Many high ranking pages will be redirected with 301 to the corresponding new page. I believe the hypothesis is this would eliminate a mix of old & new pages from sharing space in the serps and the crawlers are more likely to index more of the new site initially. I don't believe this is a great strategy, on the other hand I see some merit to the arguments for it.
Technical SEO | | medtouch0