301 Redirect URLs Tracking Codes For SEO

bosmolskate

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I am redesigning my website and changing URL structure.

I have lots of pages appear in Google Search Console showing 404 error but these are pages appended with tracking codes such as yourdomain.com/?VDgdvxdbf

Do I need to redirect the URLs with tracking codes?
 
I am redesigning my website and changing URL structure.

I have lots of pages appear in Google Search Console showing 404 error but these are pages appended with tracking codes such as yourdomain.com/?VDgdvxdbf

Do I need to redirect the URLs with tracking codes?

It depends how Googlebot found the 404 URLs... If they were from your navigation or sitemaps then not a big deal... but if that is how the world links to your pages from around the web then yes you have to redirect them or each 404 is an orphaned backlink.

you can search Google for :

"yourdomain.com/?VDgdvxdbf" -site:yourdomain.com

Which will tell you the citations for a URL... the link: search will work in some cases too, but it only works in certain circumstances and has a number of limitations on it.
 
It depends how Googlebot found the 404 URLs... If they were from your navigation or sitemaps then not a big deal... but if that is how the world links to your pages from around the web then yes you have to redirect them or each 404 is an orphaned backlink.

you can search Google for :

"yourdomain.com/?VDgdvxdbf" -site:yourdomain.com

Which will tell you the citations for a URL... the link: search will work in some cases too, but it only works in certain circumstances and has a number of limitations on it.

These are all URLs appended with tracking codes, but no one links to them and canonical tags are put in place. Does this still require me to 301 redirect 60,000 URL's from Search Console that are showing 404 although a majority are appended with tracking codes?

Thanks!
 
These are all URLs appended with tracking codes, but no one links to them and canonical tags are put in place. Does this still require me to 301 redirect 60,000 URL's from Search Console that are showing 404 although a majority are appended with tracking codes?

Thanks!
If no one links to them then you only have to worry about people who may still be in a position to click them... For example... if there are tracking links from email campaigns then do you want the links in the email to still work?

Other than that there shouldn't be any SEO problem for ignore 404s that are not backlinks to your site. Those are the right ones to ignore. You might consider making them return are 410 response if you want Google to give up on them faster.
 
Tracking codes are nothing to worry about. But you'd ideally re-direct them to a custom 404 page that returns 404 HTTP response code until you're done fixing those links. And yes, you'll have to manually do it.
 
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