404 Errors - How to get rid of them?

[michalseo]

Hi,

I am starting an SEO job on an academic site that has been completely redone.

The SEOMoz crawl detected three 404 Errors to pages that cannot be found anywhere on either Joomla or the server.

What can I do to solve this?

Thanks!!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Michal,

It could sound a bit odd, but if there are only three pages marked as 404 error pages don't spend (to much) time on it. Especially if you can't find them yourself then you're users probably also won't find them and so Google won't make this a problem. We had 404 errors ourselves which couldn't be found also but they don't make a difference in my opinion.

A good source of information to find the pages who link to your current 404 pages is in my opinion the Crawl Errors within Google Webmaster Tools. If Google also found the same three pages they will give you the linked from pages.

Hope this helps!

[RyanKent]

Export the SEOmoz crawl report to Excel. The "referrer" field will show the URL of the web page which contains the bad link. Locate the link and either fix it or remove it. Those three 404 errors will then be resolved.

[stefanok]

I totally agree. Best way forward. By the way, well done on only having 3 404 errors on re-doing a whole website

[michalseo]

Thanks a lot for answering. This was very helpful.

M.