What to do with 404 not found errors?

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wizeman

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Should i just delete them? Or do 301 redirect? Thanks in advance
 
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Redirect the 404 error to relevant pages or you can restore the deleted page.
 
Kindly go to Google webmaster tools under Crawl->>Crawl error->> then get all the pages with error and create 301 redirect because without that
 
For SEO's sake, do a 301. You can also log them for reference.
 
Do not just blindly re-direct things. You have not included enough information here for anyone to make a sound judgment on what to do. Why are the 404's happening? Are there things linking to it? Is it a page that use to exist but doesn't anymore?

The only reason you should need to 301 is:

There are external links which are out of your control pointing to a resource that you moved.
 
@dr_0x makes a good point here -- it really depends on the situation.

If there are pages on your site that are returning 404 - why are they returning 404?
Common Situations
  • Typo in URL
    • If you're accidentally linking to a URL with a typo in it from somewhere else on your site, then go fix that typo and 301 the page that has the typo in it to the correct URL.
  • Deleted Article
    • If you used to have an article at some URL but deleted it because it was bad or you got a DMCA notice or whatever, you might 301 it to a different similar page.
    • If there is no good alternative, you can 301 it to the homepage. But that isn't necessarily a perfect solution. Look up the term "soft 404."
    • Consider leaving it as a 404. Despite what people often say, having 404 pages isn't necessarily bad if you actually meant to delete those pages. Set up your 404 page to have a message like "this page doesn't exist, here are some similar pages" (there are plugins to do this) and include a search tool as well. Really, that's what may be the most useful to the user. A 301 to the homepage can be jarring and inconvenient for users. If you've invested a lot into link building for the page, then you'd probably want to 301 it to something, but if it's just some random page, a 404 is fine.
  • Someone else's linked to an incorrect URL from a different website
    • 301 their typo to whatever they were actually trying to link to
 
What about using the 410 Tag as "The page has been deleted permanently". Is the 301 to Homepage better than using 410 (in case, you cant find a proper relevant page to redirect to).
 
MrshunE said:
What about using the 410 Tag as "The page has been deleted permanently". Is the 301 to Homepage better than using 410 (in case, you cant find a proper relevant page to redirect to).
Click to expand...
If we are talking for PBNs - To the strongest page (usually the homepage), from where you will do the linking. For example the most of the links point to the homepage - you will link from there, so there should be 301 redirected the strongest non existent pages. The rest can be redirected to internal pages, sitemap etc. However lets say that the domain had popular blog so the strongest page is example.com/blog - obviously in this case is better to recreate the blog, link from there and redirect the 301s to there as well.
 
MrshunE said:
What about using the 410 Tag as "The page has been deleted permanently". Is the 301 to Homepage better than using 410 (in case, you cant find a proper relevant page to redirect to).
Click to expand...

Oh yeah -- if you permanently delete a page and there's nowhere logical to redirect to, it's probably better to 410 it rather than leave it as a 404. Thanks for the reminder that the 410 code exists.
 
You should first check the coding of your website because first of all you have to check your fault and found any then fix it first and if this doesn't help you then after you can move towards the redirection of your web pages. You must use proper interlinking of web page to avoid the 404 page if it is actually not available. Try configuring it in Google webmaster tools.
 
MatthewGraham said:
@dr_0x makes a good point here -- it really depends on the situation.

If there are pages on your site that are returning 404 - why are they returning 404?
Common Situations
  • Typo in URL
    • If you're accidentally linking to a URL with a typo in it from somewhere else on your site, then go fix that typo and 301 the page that has the typo in it to the correct URL.
  • Deleted Article
    • If you used to have an article at some URL but deleted it because it was bad or you got a DMCA notice or whatever, you might 301 it to a different similar page.
    • If there is no good alternative, you can 301 it to the homepage. But that isn't necessarily a perfect solution. Look up the term "soft 404."
    • Consider leaving it as a 404. Despite what people often say, having 404 pages isn't necessarily bad if you actually meant to delete those pages. Set up your 404 page to have a message like "this page doesn't exist, here are some similar pages" (there are plugins to do this) and include a search tool as well. Really, that's what may be the most useful to the user. A 301 to the homepage can be jarring and inconvenient for users. If you've invested a lot into link building for the page, then you'd probably want to 301 it to something, but if it's just some random page, a 404 is fine.
  • Someone else's linked to an incorrect URL from a different website
    • 301 their typo to whatever they were actually trying to link to
Click to expand...


The error encountered after implementing 301 is " too many redirects"
How to solve this, do lots of searches but all vain.
 
Reem khan said:
The error encountered after implementing 301 is " too many redirects"
How to solve this, do lots of searches but all vain.
Click to expand...

Are you also using 301s (or other redirects) to solve for https vs. http and/or www vs non-www? It could be that it is saying that there are too many redirects because it's actually doing something like this:
  • User loads http://somesite.com/some-page-that-does-not-exist.html
  • User is 301ed to https://somesite.com/some-page-that-does-not-exist.html
  • From there, user is 301ed to https://www.somesite.com/some-page-that-does-not-exist.html
  • From there, user is 301ed to https://www.somesite.com (homepage)
There could be even more redirects in there. Maybe you've set up your 301 like this:
  • https://www.somesite.com/some-page-that-does-not-exist.html --> somesite.com
And then once it redirects to the homepage, it then redirects to https:// and then to http://www., which could be adding another two redirects.

Anyway, if that is the case, then your user might actually be being redirected 2, 3, even 5+ times during that redirect. The solution would be to make your redirect go directly to correct version of the homepage instead of needing to jump through various hoops.

Although, it should be noted that as long as the page actually loads, that message "too many redirects" isn't necessarily that important as long as the final destination is the correct page. It might load slower and might not be 100% optimal for SEO; at the same time, the amount of effort that you'd potentially spend trying to minimize the number of redirects might be more of a pain in the ass than the actual benefit you'd get from it.

Edit: Try running your URL (and variations on it -- http/https and www/non-www) through a tool like this:
http://www.redirect-checker.org/index.php
It will show you the full redirect path, which will give you a good idea as to how to fix it.
 
use easy redirect plugin if you use wordpress
301 is good enough
check Waybackmachine to get old contents
 
MatthewGraham said:
Are you also using 301s (or other redirects) to solve for https vs. http and/or www vs non-www? It could be that it is saying that there are too many redirects because it's actually doing something like this:
There could be even more redirects in there. Maybe you've set up your 301 like this:
And then once it redirects to the homepage, it then redirects to https:// and then to www., which could be adding another two redirects.

Anyway, if that is the case, then your user might actually be being redirected 2, 3, even 5+ times during that redirect. The solution would be to make your redirect go directly to correct version of the homepage instead of needing to jump through various hoops.

Although, it should be noted that as long as the page actually loads, that message "too many redirects" isn't necessarily that important as long as the final destination is the correct page. It might load slower and might not be 100% optimal for SEO; at the same time, the amount of effort that you'd potentially spend trying to minimize the number of redirects might be more of a pain in the ass than the actual benefit you'd get from it.

Edit: Try running your URL (and variations on it -- http/https and www/non-www) through a tool like this:
http://www.redirect-checker.org/index.php
It will show you the full redirect path, which will give you a good idea as to how to fix it.
Click to expand...

Thanks for providing the solution, I'm facing the error through the second condition.
 
I deleted 90% of a website (5000 thin blogposts).
I'm getting 404 error now in Google Webmaster Tools.
I have no internal links to these deleted pages.
These pages have almost no links.
These pages are indexed in Google.

What schould I do (with SEO in my mind)?

A) Leave them 404
B) 301 redirect them automatically to the homepage
C) Something else,...
 
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