Old forum with 404s, what should I do?
-
Hello,
So I'm helping out some friends with their SEO. I've just run a Screaming Frog crawl of their entire site (which took hours and hours I might add). They used to have a forum connected to the site, which is no longer active. Google is still indexing all of the old URLs, which unsurprisingly return 404 errors.
What should they do to prevent Google from indexing these pages? That's assuming they need to do anything at all. They don't have access to these old forum posts and therefore won't be able to fix the URL or resource adding a 301 redirect pointing to the most relevant alternate page.
I'm new to SEO but my instinct is that they need to have the page return a 410 ‘Gone’ response code to give search engines a clear signal that the page no longer exists and won’t be returning, and removing the internal links to that URL or resource.
1. Is this interpretation correct?
2. What is the impact of leaving these 404s? There are over a thousand, so there's a lot3. What should I recommend?
-
Thanks Gaston!
-
Hi there,
You should be able to identify at least 2 types of pages:
1- The ones that are garbage..
2- Useful pages, with backlinks and/or trafficOn one hand, the garbage pages are ok to be 404'd. Google will eventually deindex those pages.
On the other hand, those pages that are usefull, you could redirect them to a page that is usefull, please do not redirect all to the homepage.That said, i'll answer your questions:
1. Is this interpretation correct?Yes is a correct interpretation, before setting 410's, check whether there are any usefull page that can be redirected. Also, keep in mind that 410 is a really strong signal and literally kills the URL and will not ever rank nor be indexed.
2. What is the impact of leaving these 404s? There are over a thousand, so there's a lot. There is no harm, as long as they still serve 404s. Google will eventually demote those pages. Remember that you are also giving 404s to GoogleBot. 3. What should I recommend?_ Consider an usefull page and others leave them as 404._Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR
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
-
Do old website files in the public_html effect SEO?
My client has about a dozen old folders filled with old websites including index files, robots, htaccess files. They are all located in separate files with in public_html. Does this effect them negatively?
Technical SEO | | Renalynd0 -
Moving site from html to Wordpress site: Should I port all old pages and redirect?
Any help would be appreciated. I am porting an old legacy .html site, which has about 500,000 visitors/month and over 10,000 pages to a new custom Wordpress site with a responsive design (long overdue, of course) that has been written and only needs a few finishing touches, and which includes many database features to generate new pages that did not previously exist. My questions are: Should I bother to port over older pages that are "thin" and have no incoming links, such that reworking them would take time away from the need to port quickly? I will be restructuring the legacy URLs to be lean and clean, so 301 redirects will be necessary. I know that there will be link juice loss, but how long does it usually take for the redirects to "take hold?" I will be moving to https at the same time to avoid yet another porting issue. Many thanks for any advice and opinions as I embark on this massive data entry project.
Technical SEO | | gheh20130 -
Old URLs Appearing in SERPs
Thirteen months ago we removed a large number of non-corporate URLs from our web server. We created 301 redirects and in some cases, we simply removed the content as there was no place to redirect to. Unfortunately, all these pages still appear in Google's SERPs (not Bings) for both the 301'd pages and the pages we removed without redirecting. When you click on the pages in the SERPs that have been redirected - you do get redirected - so we have ruled out any problems with the 301s. We have already resubmitted our XML sitemap and when we run a crawl using Screaming Frog we do not see any of these old pages being linked to at our domain. We have a few different approaches we're considering to get Google to remove these pages from the SERPs and would welcome your input. Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress). This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise. Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days. Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories. Thank you. Rosemary One year ago I removed a whole lot of junk that was on my web server but it is still appearing in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | | RosemaryB3 -
Retaining old brand traffic after a rebrand
Hi, How would you retain the organic search traffic for your old brand after a full rebrand? Website redesign, new company name, new domain name etc If we change from blahservices.com to fooservices.com and do all the things you would for a regular domain migration, will Google still return pages from the new brand fooservices.com when a user searches for old brand "blah services keyword"? We will be doing the following to try and not lose organic search traffic for our old brand: Keep PPC running on our old brand name keywords
Technical SEO | | SeenDigital.co.uk
Mention our old brand on the new website in the footer i.e. "Copyright blah services trading as foo services"
Publish a press release about the rebrand on our blog
Say something like "blah services has rebranded as foo services" in meta descriptions for a while
Put old and new brands in meta title for a while
Keep 301 redirects from old domain in place forever Is there anything else you would add to that? Thanks, K0 -
Old Product Pages
Hi Issue: I have old versions of a product page in the Google index for a product that I still carry. Why: The URLs were changed when we updated this product page a few years ago. There are four different URLs for this product -- no duplicate content issues b/c we updated the product info, Title tags, etc. So I have a few pages indexed by Google for a particular product. Including a current, up-to-date page. The old pages don't get any traffic, but if I type in google search: "product name" site:store.com then all of the versions of this page appear. The old pages don't have any links to them, only one has any PA, and as I said they don't get any traffic, and the current page is around #8 in google for its keyword. Question: Do these old pages need 301 redirects, should I ask google to remove the old URLs? It seems like Google picks the right version of this page for this keyword query, is it possible that the existence of these other pages (that are not nearly as optimized for the keyword) drag it down a bit in the results? Thanks in advance for any help
Technical SEO | | IOSC0 -
301 redirecting old content from one site to updated content on a different site
I have a client with two websites. Here are some details, sorry I can't be more specific! Their older site -- specific to one product -- has a very high DA and about 75K visits per month, 80% of which comes from search engines. Their newer site -- focused generally on the brand -- is their top priority. The content here is much better. The vast majority of visits are from referrals (mainly social channels and an email newsletter) and direct traffic. Search traffic is relatively low though. I really want to boost search traffic to site #2. And I'd like to piggy back off some of the search traffic from site #1. Here's my question: If a particular article on site #1 (that ranks very well) needs to be updated, what's the risk/reward of updating the content on site #2 instead and 301 redirecting the original post to the newer post on site #2? Part 2: There are dozens of posts on site #1 that can be improved and updated. Is there an extra risk (or diminishing returns) associated with doing this across many posts? Hope this makes sense. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | djreich0 -
Removing an Old Address Company Moved
Hi there we have a new client who moved their offices. They have created many new listings but they still have some old listings out there that need to be deleted with the old address. And also update some old listings with the new address. Question, what would be the approach for this? Use a third party like Yext? Is there something cheaper than $400 per client? Or do it myself? I already started running into issues, the Yahoo wouldn't let me claim it, I can foresee some issues. For example I am sure Citygrid will do what they have done to other client.Trying to upsale my client instead of just changing their address when they call to verify. PS How many hours would you allot for a project like this? Thanks for the input.
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Disallow: /search/ in robots but soft 404s are still showing in GWT and Google search?
Hi guys, I've already added the following syntax in robots.txt to prevent search engines in crawling dynamic pages produce by my website's search feature: Disallow: /search/. But soft 404s are still showing in Google Webmaster Tools. Do I need to wait(it's been almost a week since I've added the following syntax in my robots.txt)? Thanks, JC
Technical SEO | | esiow20130