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.
Are thousands of 404s a problem?
-
An ecommerce site I work on has around 16,000 URLs that are 404s in Webmaster Tools. The vast majority are for products that are no longer stocked by the site, which is a natural occurrence in ecommerce.
But my question is, could these possibly be harming rankings?
-
It's not necessarily an SEO problem (as long as you don't redirect all 404s to your homepage at least. I've seen that be an issue in the past.)
However, use it as an opportunity. Make the 404 a sales page if you have that many. It's a lander now for "the product you were searching for is out of stock - here are the search results on our site for similar products" etc. You can turn it into something productive to have that many 404s.
From WMT, mark them as fixed and then anytime one pops up, find out what is linking to the product and try to remove that link. You don't want to be linking to 404s internally if you can help it (bad user experience = Google's nightmare) so having 1000s of 404s isn't bad but try to break any internal links to them. (Xenu can help as well if you don't feel like waiting for WMT.)
-
As Kevin stated they do not directly impact your ranking.
The user experience might be harmed if the 404 page is not optimized for the user.Using a custom 404 page you can assist the user to further explore the website on which they have arrived. If this is not done they might immediately leave the website and visit another one.
Google uses usage metrics in it's rankings now and therefor a lot of 404 pages might indirectly impact rankings.
-
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
-
Problems with Meta Title on Bing
On the Bing search engine, it isn't showing the actual meta title we have for a website. It's showing something different. However, the correct meta title is showing on the Google search engine. Has anyone had the same issue? Has anyone been able to fix this issue? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Harrison.Stickboy0 -
Problem with Yoast not seeing any of this website's text/content
Hi, My client has a new WordPress site http://www.londonavsolutions.co.uk/ and they have installed the Yoast Premium SEO plug-in. They are having issues with getting the lights to go green and the main problem is that on most pages Yoast does not see any words/content – although there are plenty of words on the pages. Other tools can see the words, however Yoast is struggling to find any and gives the following message:- Bad SEO score. The text contains 0 words. This is far below the recommended minimum of 300 words. Add more content that is relevant for the topic. Readability - You have far too little content. Please add some content to enable a good analysis. They have contacted the website developer who says that there is nothing wrong, but they are frustrated that they cannot use the Yoast tools themselves because of this issue, plus Yoast are offering no support with the issue. I hope that one of you guys has seen this problem before, or can spot a problem with the way the site has been built and can perhaps shed some light on the problem. I didn't build the site myself so won't be offended if you spot problems with it. Thanks in advance, Ben
Technical SEO | | bendyman0 -
Www2 vs www problem
Hi, I have a website that has an old version and a new version. The content is not duplicate on the different versions.
Technical SEO | | TihomirPetrov
The point is that the old version uses www. and non-www before the domain and the new one uses www2. My questions is: Is that a problem and what should be done? Thank you in advance!0 -
We have set up 301 redirects for pages from an old domain, but they aren't working and we are having duplicate content problems - Can you help?
We have several old domains. One is http://www.ccisound.com - Our "real" site is http://www.ccisolutions.com The 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain works. However, the 301-redirects for interior pages, like: http://www.ccisolund.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators do not work. This URL should redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators but as you can see it does not. Our IT director supplied me with this code from the HT Access file in hopes that someone can help point us in the right direction and suggest how we might fix the problem: RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} ccisound.com$ [NC] RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L] Any ideas on why the 301 redirect isn't happening? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Is it a problem to have a homepage with a slug / URL ?
Hi, We are designing a web site for one of our clients, and using a home made CMS. I don't know how this CMS has been built, but anyways, in the end the homepage has a URL format which looks like this : www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html. No www.mydomain.com. Is it dangerous for SEO to have a slug/URL directly on the homepage ? Do you have experiences, cases where it has impacted a site negatively ? The main problem I expect is duplicate content (with Google seeing both www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html as being different pages) but apparently the CMS is doing a 302 redirect from the root domain to the URL (I told my colleague it should at least be a 301). Sorry if this question seems like basic SEO knowledge, but I really can't find a definitive answer on the subject. Thank you very much 🙂
Technical SEO | | edantadis0 -
Trailing Slash Problems
Link juice being split between trailing slash and non versions. ie. ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk and ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk/ Initially asked in here and was told to do a rewrite in the htaccess file. I don't have access to this with squarespace, nor can I add canonical tags on a page by page basis. 301 redirect from scentsy-uk to scentsy-uk/ didn't work either...said that the redirect wasn't completing in an error message on the browser. Squarespace hasn't been very helpful at all. My question is....is there another way to fix this? or should I just call it a day with squarespace and move to wordpress?
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
Set base-href to subfolders - problems?
A customer is using the <base>-tag in an odd way: <base href="http://domain.com/1.0.0/1/1/"> My own theory is that the subfolders are added as the root because of revision control. CSS, images and internal links are used like this:
Technical SEO | | Vivamedia
internal link I ran a test with Xenu Link Sleuth and found many broken links on the site, but I can't say if it is due to the base-tag. I have read that the base-tag may cause problems in some browsers, but is this usage of base-tag bad in some SEO-perspective? I have a lot of problems with this customer and I want to know if the base-tag is a part of it.0 -
Removing robots.txt on WordPress site problem
Hi..am a little confused since I ticked the box in WordPress to allow search engines to now crawl my site (previously asked for them not to) but Google webmaster tools is telling me I still have robots.txt blocking them so am unable to submit the sitemap. Checked source code and the robots instruction has gone so a little lost. Any ideas please?
Technical SEO | | Wallander0