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what to do with a high amount of 404 pages ?

by Ben Refaat
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
In one of my websites
When i go to webmaster tools, I found that I have 800
404 pages
When I check those pages I found that all pages not important pages in my website

So, What should I do ?

Should I Redirect All Page OR leave it
#404 #amount #high #pages
  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    404 errors are a product of the internet, servers, and crawlers.

    They don't matter unless you have a money page that now can't be found.

    That would be your problem to find out why it's deleted.

    Google used to have a thing about telling people about "wasting resources" to crawl useless pages.

    In 2016, wasting resources is a nonissue.

    You can never, ever, ever, ever, ever, fix all 404 errors.

    Some scripts create useless pages. If you have installed some script that does that, uninstall it.

    Sure, probably some fool will respond about the need to eliminate 404 errors.....
    The fool does not know you can't do that. Humans still surf the internet.

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

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  • Profile picture of the author melons
    I have about 500, none critical. I have just left them, I wouldn't sweat yours too much. Just make sure there aren't any dead ends that could ruin the reader's experience and cost you a sale.
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  • Profile picture of the author vic1
    I always get a ton when I forget to delete all the demo pages from a big WP theme than go back and delete them a month later. Soon after the 404's start coming in.

    As said before, part of the Internet, no big deal.
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  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    Google eventually drops the 404s from their index. I'd browse through the list (in Webmaster Tools), and see what the pages or files are. This number of 404 could mean that there's a problem in your site configuration. If it's a problem you'd should see a clear pattern by looking at the actual links.

    It's also possible that it means absolutely nothing.

    If there's a 404'd page that has or might have backlinks, that's something you should redirect. Otherwise, you can just ignore the 404s.
    Signature
    Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
    Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

    What's your excuse?
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Originally Posted by Ben Refaat View Post

    In one of my websites
    When i go to webmaster tools, I found that I have 800
    404 pages
    When I check those pages I found that all pages not important pages in my website

    So, What should I do ?

    Should I Redirect All Page OR leave it


    If you're not going to build out the problem pages then 301 redirect the URLs to a live webpage.

    With 800 404 URLs odds are you're wasting traffic when they bail on useless pages. Nobody is going to sit there staring at a 404 page.

    Google obviously won't rank a 404 page for long.

    Also, with 800 404s I bet you have a few thousand broken internal links on the same domain.

    Run Screaming Frog & fix the problem.
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    • Profile picture of the author yakaferci
      To seriously tackle the 404 issue on a website, a technical but trustable methodology is the following :

      1) extract all the 404 lines from the good old Web Server log files (for example with the 'grep' command or a specialized tool)

      2) analyze those lines to find out :

      - which URLs get the most 404
      - the Referer for each line, which indicates the page that the user clicked to reach this bad URL

      3) this analysis will allow you to split the 404 into 4 categories, with a different solution for each :

      - 404 caused by an incorrect internal link on your web site : those are the easiest the fix because by definition the incorrect links are on your website
      - 404 caused by old but interesting backlinks that points on a URL of your site that had disappeared : to fix this, the best option is to make a new 301 redirect pointing on an existing URL on your site whose contents is very similar to the old URL
      - 404 caused by incorrect backlink : you can either contact the owner of the site hosting the backlink to fix it, or make a 301 redirect on your site from the wrong URL to the correct URL (if the backlink is worth it)
      - 404 caused by random tools, hackers, low quality sites... : you should not worry about those (unless someone finds a security hole on your site !)

      HTH
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  • Profile picture of the author hassangcf
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