Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Dealing with 404s during site migration
-
Hi everyone - What is the best way to deal with 404s on an old site when you're migrating to a new website? Thanks, Luke
-
thanks Moosa - it does
-
Thanks - useful feedback - Do you need to forward existing 301s as well? 301s on the site you're moving from? Or might that create complications?
-
I agree with Russ! If you have a 404 page see if you have exact page on your new website (or atleast nearer to exact) if yes, redirect! If you are in to ecommerce industry and you really don’t think that 404 page have any other alternate, in that case try redirecting it to 404 pages!
Make sure the page is customized, provide value to users and allow them to continue their journey on the website.
Hope this helps!
-
If you can, find an exact or close-to-exact replacement on your new site and 301 redirect. You might want to go through analytics to find any trafficked pages and make sure you have them 301 redirected as well. In some cases, you might need to 404 pages, but make sure the 404 pages are useful to help your users find the best content on the new site.
-
Luke,
Refer to this fantastic post of Modestos for better understanding:
https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos
This will certainly help!
Umar
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
-
SEO on Jobs sites: how to deal with expired listings with "Google for Jobs" around
Dear community, When dealing with expired job offers on jobs sites from a SEO perspective, most practitioners recommend to implement 301 redirects to category pages in order to keep the positive ranking signals of incoming links. Is it necessary to rethink this recommendation with "Google for Jobs" is around? Google's recommendations on how to handle expired job postings does not include 301 redirects. "To remove a job posting that is no longer available: Remove the job posting from your sitemap. Do one of the following: Note: Do NOT just add a message to the page indicating that the job has expired without also doing one of the following actions to remove the job posting from your sitemap. Remove the JobPosting markup from the page. Remove the page entirely (so that requesting it returns a 404 status code). Add a noindex meta tag to the page." Will implementing 301 redirects the chances to appear in "Google for Jobs"? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grnjbs07175 -
Adult Toys Sites
Does anyone know of any changes SEOwise when running an adult toy site versus a normal eCommerce site? Is there any tips or suggestions that are worth knowing to achieve rankings faster? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Multilingual Site and 301 redirection
Hey there awesome people of Moz I have this site that has many languages in it. The main language is English and my developer did the following www.example.com ( is the main site ) which redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en if your geo location is supported by our languages then you will automatically be redirected to whatever language you have in your country but does the first language with is english have to 301 redirect to www.example.com/en ? I thought that the right way is to just leave /en at the root file. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Do I have to optimize every page on my site?
Hi guys I run my own photography webstie (www.hemeravisuals.co.uk Going through the process optimizing my page for seo. I have one question I have a few gallery pages with no text etc? Do I still have to optimize these ? Would it rank my site lower if they weren't optimized? And how can i do this sucessfully with little text on these pages ( I have indepth text on these subjects on my services & pricing pages? Kind Regards Cam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hemeravisuals0 -
Regional and Global Site
We have numerous versions of what is basically the same site, that targets different countries, such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa. These websites use Tlds to designate the region, for example, co.uk, co.za I believe this is sufficient (with a little help from Google Webmastertools) to convince the search engines what site is for what region. My question is how do we tell the search engines to send traffic from other regions besides the above to our global site, which would have a .com TLD. For example, we don't have a Brazilian site, how do we drive traffic from Brazil to our global .com site? Many thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Why does a site have no domain authority?
A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1. When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0 -
Multiple sites in the same niche
Hi All A question regarding multiple sites in the same niche... If I have say 10 sites all targetting the same niche yet all on different C-class IPs with different hosts, registrars, whois data and ages can I use the same template, or will Google discern a pattern? Basically I have developed a WordPress template which I want to use on the sites albeit with different logos / brand colours. NB/ All of the 10 sites will have unique, original content and they will NOT be interlinked
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielparry1