Resolving 404 pages in webmaster tools

T

tehrijack

Registered Member

Aug 10, 2014

91

5

• Dec 6, 2016

• #1

Hi,

I have a website and due to some url rewriting and changes the site now has around 120 pages throwing 404 error and webmaster showing increase in 404 error pages.

What should be the best solution to resolve them.

I was thinking to disallow all of them using robots.txt.

Second option is 301 redirection but doing too many redirects might hamper the site's rankings .


Please suggest.

 

D

Deleted member 813988

Guest

• Dec 6, 2016

• #2

301 redirect

 

validseo

Senior Member

Jul 17, 2013

928

551

• Dec 6, 2016

• #3

se900se said:

301 redirect

Click to expand...

I agree. Any backlinks to those 404 URLs will be orphaned. 301 them to the new URL to recover the orphaned backlinks.

 

T

tehrijack

Registered Member

Aug 10, 2014

91

5

• Dec 7, 2016
• Thread Starter Thread Starter

• #4

validseo said:

I agree. Any backlinks to those 404 URLs will be orphaned. 301 them to the new URL to recover the orphaned backlinks.

Click to expand...

If I redirect 120 backlinks won't it hamper the site rankings ?

 

validseo

Senior Member

Jul 17, 2013

928

551

• Dec 7, 2016

• #5

tehrijack said:

If I redirect 120 backlinks won't it hamper the site rankings ?

Click to expand...

Losing the backlinks to 120 pages is usually worse. Ideally you should get it right the first time and never change the URL format... but we've all made that mistake.

 

Luco

Banned by request of account holder

Dec 7, 2016

1,020

1,109

• Dec 7, 2016

• #6

Me personally when i have few 404 errors im using 301, to recover backlinks, but when i have alot of 404 then i build an 404 HTML page, where i add some description, few tags and links to relevant content. But all of this i do in adult sites. Working good for me in both cases.

 

thebigweb

Regular Member

Nov 19, 2007

356

138

• Dec 7, 2016

• #7

Agreed, if the pages had good content and had links to them or even a little traffic, individually 301 them to related pages on your site. If there are lots of 404 pages that are pretty worthless I would do what the other poster stated, build a decent 404 page with a link to your homepage. A 404 is ok, you should not get penalized unless you have changed your URL structure on-mass causing the majority of your site to 404.