404 Errors

[Dallas]

Hello Team,

I noticed that my site has 1,000s of 404 errors. Not sure how this happened, maybe when I updated our CMS.

My question is, should I worry about them. Should I delete them or just leave them alone.

Thank you for your feedback!

[Confetti_Wedding]

Hi there,

Yes - you should definitely worry about them. Get them fixed or add a 301 redirect to a relevant page.

In my experience, lots of 404's often stem from a small number of places such so it shouldn't be a case of having to manually fix every single link. If you fix the link in one place, you'll probably fix it in hundreds of others. Download a CSV of your broken links from Open Site Explorer. You'll easily be able to see the referring page and fix the links.

Hope that helps.

[Dallas]

Thank you very much!!!

How do I find the 404's on Open Site Explorer, would that be on the top pages tab?

I'll make sure to send out some love from one of my sites to your confetti

[smstv]

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Also, ask your hosting administrator, to help; they often can fix 404, & 301 server side.

[Confetti_Wedding]

No worries,

Sorry - my mistake - I didn't mean Open Site Explorer. You can find the 404 report in your campaign settings in your SEOMoz dashboard. Click Errors and Download as CSV top right. You can sort the CSV in Excel to group all of your 404's and easily find the referral page.

If for some reason you can't access the Errors page in your dashboard (still waiting for your report to finish etc), you can do pretty mush the same with software called Xenu Link Sleuth.

Cheers,