(VERY) old deleted pages that appear in GSC

[iivan]

Hi,
I have a question that I can not find a solution.

I have a website that changed the structure two years ago. I could not 301 redirect the old pages to the new pages (many contents have changed).

To all the pages that are gone, I show an 410 error.

The problem is that every day on the google search console reported new pages that I deleted two years ago!

Furthermore, the new pages created are so difficult to position in the SERP.

Has anything like this happened to you?

 

[davids355]

I think you need to get a list of all the missing pages and then 301 redirect them to the most relevant new pages.
Are these missing pages still linked anywhere from your current site? If so you can find a tool that will look for broken links, something like this tool -

http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/

If not, you can scrape the results from Google using the operator - site:yoursite.com - then you can check that list to confirm which pages are dead. Something like this site will work for checking status of a list of URLs -

http://www.urlitor.com/

 

[iivan]

Hi @davids355 ,
Thanks for the reply.

No, the old pages are no longer linked by any internal page. I am the developer and I know what I did (lol). Also, for safety, I had a check with screaming frog

Using the site operator, this way: site:website/category/sub-category/* (this was the old site structure) I did not find any results.

However, I repeat, every day GSC notifies me new pages that it did not find.

Look here:
hostr.co/file/zXygJyunnky1/gsc1.png

this is the detail of a random url:
hostr.co/file/TKmdzHX87YMU/gsc2.png

I'm sorry but the forum does not allow me to insert images directly in the thread.

 

[davids355]

So, those pages that it is notifying you about, are they linked to from anywhere on your site? And if you search for the URL on google, are they in the index? And lastly, are they / were they actually your pages (Just thinking in case your site had been hacked or something)?

 

[iivan]

No,
I repeat:

• the pages were deleted two years ago.
• they are no longer linked by any internal page
• these pages are not in the google index
• the site has not been violated

 

[rimvy]

Redirect all 404 pages to homepage

 

[iivan]

Redirect all 404 pages to homepage

LOL this is the worst choice for a 301 redirect.

 

[Unreliable Witness]

I've come across the same problem. Pages that haven't existed for 8 years are still referenced by Google in the errors report.

Personally I think Google keeps a list of URLs to crawl, and how often to crawl each. If page 1 linked to page 2, but page 1 is low quality (and therefore not often crawled), page 2 will stay on the list even if it was removed a long time ago because there is a reference to it from another page that Google has yet to recrawl. Page 2 might be down to be crawled more often, but because it was removed, it comes up in the WMT errors report.

Unless either human visitors will want to be redirected, or if there are a significant number of valuable, external links to the URL coming up in the error report then I would either change the page to report a 410, or 301 redirect to a page that reports a 410 (better because if you have multiple URLs in the report, they will all fall out except the single URL reporting a 410).

Don't redirect to any other page unless that page is relevant to the original. Doing so can mess up an anchor text profile. Google is also unlikely to transfer link juice.

 

[rimvy]

LOL this is the worst choice for a 301 redirect.

Why?

 

[iivan]

@Unreliable Witness good! so it's a "normal" situation? Now I set a 410 error.
Can I make "Mark as fixed" in the GSC?

@rimvy

• moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects
• moz.com/community/q/404-redirects-to-the-homepage-is-this-good-bad-ugly
• moz.com/community/q/too-many-301-redirects-to-home-page-is-this-possible
• etc

 

[Unreliable Witness]

"Mark as fixed" just removes them from the list you see in WMT. Use it as often or as little as you like. I tend to clear them out once or twice a week.

 

[Unreliable Witness]

Why?

Firstly because there might be no benefit passed - common belief is that Google only honors passing link juice if the two pages are similar.

Secondly because you definitely do change the anchor text profile of the target page. You may also possibly redirect any low quality signals the original page had.

 

[iivan]

ok, thanks for the information!