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404 issues

by yagobi21
12 replies
  • SEO
    • |
So my site has a bunch of 404s due to changing platforms and I set them all to a 301 redirect to my current home page. Is this bad? Google is showing them all as site crawl errors but shouldn't that have been taken care of with the 301 redirect? Help please. Thanks!
#404 #issues
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    You don't want to 301 redirect them to your home page. You want to redirect the old URL's to their corresponding new URLs.
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    • Profile picture of the author yukon
      Banned
      Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

      You don't want to 301 redirect them to your home page. You want to redirect the old URL's to their corresponding new URLs.


      ...If he had any internal pages ranked on the old platform (old URLs) or followed backlinks pointing at the old internal URLs, otherwise it doesn't matter. There's nothing to lose.

      Plus he's already got 404s so there's a chance he won't recover If he had pages ranked.
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by yukon View Post

        ...If he had any internal pages ranked on the old platform (old URLs) or followed backlinks pointing at the old internal URLs, otherwise it doesn't matter. There's nothing to lose.
        That is definitely true.

        However, in less time than it takes to check if a page is ranking for anything or has any followed links pointing to it, you could just write the 301 code for the page.
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        • Profile picture of the author yagobi21
          So when I am in my webmaster tools account and I am looking at crawl errors I see 1012 that are "Not Found" for desktop and 68 for smart phone. That 1012 seems like a pretty big number is this going to effect my on-page success? I went through them all and the ones I needed to 301 I did but the products which no longer exist I just left 404. Is this the best strategy? Thanks in advance!
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          • Profile picture of the author nina789
            Originally Posted by yagobi21 View Post

            So when I am in my webmaster tools account and I am looking at crawl errors I see 1012 that are "Not Found" for desktop and 68 for smart phone. That 1012 seems like a pretty big number is this going to effect my on-page success? I went through them all and the ones I needed to 301 I did but the products which no longer exist I just left 404. Is this the best strategy? Thanks in advance!
            In google console, go to crawl error status, select those 404 urls which you have redirected to new urls and mark them as fixed. For 404 urls which you left as it is because products are no longer available, go to 'fetch as google' tab and fetch these urls (but don't render them). Check after 4-5 days when the webmaster it updated and you will find that many crawl errors are solved. Follow this strategy until all errors are gone. But dont fetch all 404 urls in one same day. This strategy worked for me.
            Dont forget to share results if it works for you too.
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  • Profile picture of the author yagobi21
    That would be 960 urls sir. Also, some of them are product urls which are no longer needed. Should I seriously redirect all of them and just do a url removal request in google webmaster tools? If I leave the 404s redirecting to my homepage is it that big of a deal?
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    • Profile picture of the author paulgl
      Originally Posted by yagobi21 View Post

      That would be 960 urls sir. Also, some of them are product urls which are no longer needed. Should I seriously redirect all of them and just do a url removal request in google webmaster tools? If I leave the 404s redirecting to my homepage is it that big of a deal?
      What you need is a custom 404 page. Done and done. Give your visitors a soft landing.

      However, the more popular urls, that is the ones that people are actually finding in SERPs, you should have kept those.

      You also could have hired someone to do it right.

      Asking for a removal of an indexed page is silly when you stop and think about it.

      960....if you yourself did some sort of a stock page for each, with a little different for each one...

      If would take me 1 minute to create and upload 1 page. 960 minutes is 16 hours of work.

      I would never wipe out 960 indexed pages unless I was completely starting over.

      Paul
      Signature

      If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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    • Profile picture of the author savidge4
      Originally Posted by yagobi21 View Post

      That would be 960 urls sir. Also, some of them are product urls which are no longer needed. Should I seriously redirect all of them and just do a url removal request in google webmaster tools? If I leave the 404s redirecting to my homepage is it that big of a deal?
      That's 960 pages where someone thought they clicked on something specific.. and you are throwing them back to the home page.. that's solid UX ( user experience ) if Ive ever heard it. ( sarcasm ) If you do not have a exact match page to redirect to, I would send them at the very least to a category page or the like.

      In terms of SEO a ver y general rule of thumb.. if its easy, it probably isn't "Right" . Do things the "Right" way and in the long run it will be worth the time and effort. Like Paul said, something like 16 hours - small price to pay Sir
      Signature
      Success is an ACT not an idea
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
      Originally Posted by yagobi21 View Post

      That would be 960 urls sir. Also, some of them are product urls which are no longer needed. Should I seriously redirect all of them and just do a url removal request in google webmaster tools? If I leave the 404s redirecting to my homepage is it that big of a deal?
      Yes, you should seriously redirect all of them. The ones that no longer exist, I would redirect to a similar product.

      If you were ranking for anything, redirecting all those URLs to your home page will screw up your rankings, and as mentioned above it provides a horrible user experience as well.

      And do not request the URLS to be removed in webmaster tools. Do the proper redirects and Google will figure it out and those old ones will drop out eventually.
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  • Profile picture of the author SEOtraveler
    This should just be really confusing for a user to click on a specific product page and then land on a homepage without any explanation, so the wise way would be to redirect the URLs to same newer pages (only those which have a valid alternative), and to set up a nice custom 404 page for other 404s.

    You shouldn`t request them to be removed from indexes, but you`d better take care of the interlinking and make sure no links from your valid pages are leading to the 404s.

    The search engines will sort that out, and the non-existent pages and orphans will eventually disappear from the SERPs.
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  • Profile picture of the author yagobi21
    Got it! Thanks guys. I know SEO is all about doing things the right way and then being rewarded for it but I am new to doing my own SEO so saving time for me was a priority guess I need to put down further on the priority list. Thanks again!
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  • Profile picture of the author LukaB
    Banned
    You should be redirecting them somewhere else.

    Products don't exist? Send them to the category they were in.

    URL just changed? send them to the new URL
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