Do Google penalise you for having too many 404's?
-
Hi There
I have been doing some work reducing the number of 404's displayed in the Crawl Errors found in Googles Webmaster Tools.
We had a lot of products that were no longer available so have now been removed to reduce the number of 404s that had been found.
However, there are a number of URLs that have been crawled that do not exist on our website and have been flagged in the list of Crawl Errors. I want to know if Google will penalise us for this, perhaps affecting our quality score or if they can see that this is something out of our control.
This site for example: http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html has generated a lot of truncated URLs on its site that link to pages that don't exist on our site: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri… That is the exact link that it is trying to locate.
Here is the report for that particular link. As you can see the content has been scraped by other sites which has spread the problem further.
Pages that link to http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri..
URL Discovery Date
http://www.justsearchit.com.au/for_flowers_offers,3.html
Sep 12, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://www.flexfinder.com/flowers_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_with.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/of_flowers_offers_from.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/for_flowers_for_less_ltd_includes.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/flowers_for_less_than_do.html
Sep 9, 2011I have spotted a lot of these and currently have around 3.3K 404s in total, a majority are from sites we don't control.
Is there an acceptable number of 404s a site should aim for and is the above something we should address or are Google smart enough to work out that we can't fix this ourselves?
Thanks!
Sam.
-
use a link checker to figure all the links that are 404.
use mod rewrite to send them to the home page or a given page when the one requested is not found.
google mod rewrite if you dont know wjhat it is
-
Hey Sam,
I believe this can adversely effect your overall site rankings, not due to penalties from the 404's themselves, but due to the assumed high bounce rate on those pages - which is going to increase your site's overall average bounce rate - which Google will attribute to the value of your website's content.
Just as Manischa said, I would 301 these pages to functioning content pages if you do not plan on resurrecting them, and if you do I would use a 302 (temporary redirect) until you have the content back up on those pages at which point you remove the temporary redirect status.
Hope this helps.
-Nick
-
I have had similar problems (although with fewer pages), and did not notice a negative effect. If you can, I would still try to 301 redirect the URLs these pages point to to real pages. This will also help users which might click on one of the links (but does anyone click on the links from these scraper pages? I have never seen anything in my referrals...)
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
-
Moving our Google Analytics Account to a New Account
My company is building a new website with a new web development company. Our old website development company hosted our Google Analytics account on their account (this was done 13+ years ago, probably a good idea then, but we definitely would've done it differently knowing what we know now). I've been researching how we could move our GA property to a new account owned by us, but according to this article: "There are some circumstances in which you cannot move a property:
Reporting & Analytics | | GreatLegalMarketing
-> The source account and the destination account are not in the same Google Marketing Platform organization. Contact an organization admin to make sure both accounts belong to the same organization." In our case, the source account and the destination account do not belong to the same organization. I may just have to accept that we are losing 13+ years of historical data about our website, and if that's the case, oh well. But, if anyone has an idea how we can export/import our GA data to our new analytics account, I would greatly appreciate it.0 -
Google Analytics global page empty
Hello, I don't know what happened with my Google Analytics initial page. For around a week I have there all my websites, but they show no results on global page. If I enter on any property I can see everything as normal, just not on the initial page. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/JKFVIh4 For sure I changed anything that I shouldn't. Perhaps you know what's wrong? Thank you in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | prozis0 -
Google Analytics SEO Queries Not Showing
Hi All, This might be a silly question, but for all the properties I monitor in Google Analytics, I'm now showing no data for SEO Queries under Acquisition for the past 6 days. Normally I would expect a few day delay in queries, but nothing for 6 days is somewhat peculiar especially as it was functioning fine prior to November 12th. Does anyone have insight into what might be going on? Thanks! URaNMa3
Reporting & Analytics | | amichaels0 -
Buffer Link and Google Impressions
Afternoon, I noticed a spike in impressions over a couple of days in April, so I investigated Analytics to see where these were coming from. It appears these impressions were split between two URLs; one was a blog post, the other was the Buffer link to the blog post that we used on Twitter and Facebook. According to Analytics, this Buffer URL received 1000 impressions over two days, with an average SERP position of 16. This surely can't be right, can it? Is this just another Analytics quirk? After two days of a decent amount of impressions to this Buffer link, the amount of impressions dropped to pretty much zero. I know Tweets are now starting to rank, but this would be the Twitter URL, not the Buffer link to our blog post? Any ideas, Cheers, Lewis
Reporting & Analytics | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Bing vs Google Keyword Research
Hi All, I have carried out keyword research based on Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, competitors and various other toolsets.
Reporting & Analytics | | Mark_Ch
My research has been based on performance metrics favored towards Google.
I'm looking to research keyword traffic metrics and suggestions based on Bing Ads Intelligence. My Logic
I have compiled my master list based on Google metrics.
I will carry out Bing search traffic metrics based on my Google master list.
I will carry out Bing keyword suggestions based on my Google master list. My Questions
#1 Will my logic yield me any favorable benefits based on the high number of Google users vs Bing users
#2 Should Bing favor a particular keyword with high search traffic compared to Google, is there a fear that creating a 'seo user friendly website page' could dilute link juice based on the high Google users. Any other useful advice would be welcome. Regards Mark0 -
Google Analytics and DNS change
Our new alumni application is going be tested at domain uva.imodules.com . We are going to collect traffic data with a Google analytics account number UA-884652-XX. So going to uva.imodules.com/myPage.html would send its data to Google Analytics with that account number. Then when it is ready for production we are going to just change the domain name of the application and switch the DNS over to dardencommunity.darden.virginia.edu . So going to dardencommunity.darden.virginia.edu /myPage.html would send its data to Google Analtics with that SAME account number. Aside from having the testing domain data in the same profile are there any other issues/problems we may run into?
Reporting & Analytics | | Darden0 -
Google +1 and ranking effect .
Anyone have any experience as to what effect google +1 has on ranking? Trying to figure out what impact it might have. Ecommerce site in norway selling childrens clothing. Atm we are ranking 25th for main targetted word childrens clothing (barneklær in norwegian). on google.no this has a difficulty of 34. None of main competitors have any amount of google +1's on their site. Lets say if I in some way could manage to get 100 ppl to push +1 button. Would this affect our ranking at all ? Might be impossible to answer but if anyone has thoughts about it I am interested. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | danlae0 -
Seeing / and no / in Google Analytics
When I look at my Google Analytics code, I see that the same content will show up twice, once with a / at the end of the URL, and once without. My site is at http://www.skypeenglishclasses.com. Does anyone know why this would happen? Is it duplicate content?
Reporting & Analytics | | Paulguy0