Thousands of 404s

[LeahHutcheon]

Hi there,

I'm working on a site that has a ridiculous number of 404s being returned by webmaster tools. We believe this was because there was an onpage error that was amending the urls and adding in folders that shouldn't have been in a big spiral i.e. /salons/uk/teeth became something like /salons/uk/teeth/salons/edinburgh/hair/teeth...

Anyway, we think the issue is now sorted, but these pages were indexed it seems, and so it looks like Google is still searching for them when it crawls the site. What's my best move? It's the sheers volume (over 13,000) that has me concerned so I thought it best to seek some expert advice before continuing.

Thanks in advance!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Philip,

If all the urls have the same URL pattern, I would give it a try adding the structure to the robots.txt so you'll prevent Google from crawling the pages. Even better would be if you could add the noindex tags to the page.

Hope this helps!

[AndersS]

Hi Philip!

If these URL's are already indexed, you should 301 Redirect them to the right URL (if they by chance have some inbound links). You could also try the URL removal tool from Google (see https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663416) if all you want is to get rid of them.

Good luck, hope this helps.

//Anders

[GeoffKenyon]

As it's all sorted now, I really wouldn't worry about them too much. You can use the remove URL functionality in WMT, but this is a manual process so I wouldn't do this. If I were in your position, I'd probably just let the pages keep 404ing'. After a bit, Google will usually stop trying to recrawl the 404 pages. Right now they are probably trying to recrawl incase the 404 was an accident.

If it's causing a bandwidth problem, you can solve with a robots.txt as suggested earlier.