404 Best Practices

[CleanEdisonInc]

Hello All,

So about 2 months ago, there was a massive spike in the number of crawl errors on my site according to Google Webmaster tools.

I handled this by sending my webmaster a list of the broken pages with working pages that they should 301 redirect to.

Admittedly, when I looked back a couple weeks later, the number had gone down only slightly, so I sent another list to him (I didn't realize that you could 'Mark as fixed' in webmaster tools)

So when I sent him more, he 301 redirected them again (with many duplicates) as he was told without really digging any deeper.

Today, when I talked about more re-directs, he suggested that 404's do have a place, that if they are actually pages that don't exist anymore, then a ton of 301 re-directs may not be the answer.

So my two questions are:

1. Should I continue to relentlessly try to get rid of all 404's on my site, and if so, do I have to be careful not to be lazy and just send most of them to the homepage.

2. Are there any tools or really effective ways to remove duplicate 301 redirect records on my .htaccess (because the size of it at this point could very well be slowing down my site).

Any help would be appreciated, thanks

[jesse-landry]

It's true that 404s have a place and can exist just fine so long as people aren't landing on them. Think of it from a usability standpoint; if the link exists somewhere on a foreign domain and is pointing to your site, you should 301 it. That way if somebody clicks it they don't get dropped into 404-hell.

Otherwise don't worry about it. Google will eventually stop looking at pages that 404. They're only notifying you in case it was a mistake and you want to capture a potential audience that is coming through that link.

Best practice is to 301 broken links if they receive traffic or have some link juice you aren't interested in losing. Also be sure and create a custom 404 page for any that you may miss out there so that at least the person arrives on a page branded by you with easily accessible links to find what they might be looking for.

Not sure about multiple 301s in an htaccess file (I'm more accustomed to an IIS server) but my guess would be that it shouldn't matter. They aren't pointing to different places and crossing back to eachother so you are in no danger of a redirect loop. I would imagine the spiders will follow one of them and ignore the others.

Hope this helps and good luck!

[Thos003]

The error that is most problematic is when you have 404 pages that you are linking to internally and/or are found in your site map. Google reporting that an external site is linking to a 404 page isn't as damaging. If it truly is an error then a 404 is okay to have, but not preferable. If the page linking to you made an error, it would be preferable to seek out the owner of that page and ask them to fix it. However, if you can't reach the owner and if the referring website is a valuable traffic source and/or that link juice is important then, yes, add a 301 redirect.

[MoosaHemani]

As far as the Google Webmaster is concern it usually take a bit of time to get updated especially when it comes to 404 pages so soul trust on this one tool will be dangerous. I prefer using screaming frog to see the current situation of the website as their audit is based on the current website condition.

I do agree with Jesse that 404s do have a place and they can exist but the problem starts when any of the 404 page either contain good amount of link juice or traffic landing on those pages. In order to save your link juice and positional traffic you have to land them to a page that actually exist and can entertain your traffic well so that is why we recommend using 301 to page that can entertain will and full fill user’s expectation.

I will also suggest you to create a custom 404 page that helps people move to different areas of the website.

Hope this helps

[Paddy_Moogan]

Thanks for the question.

Just to add to what the other guys have said, here is a helpful article from Google which explains a bit more about their stance on 404s.

In general, you should try to 301 redirect 404 errors to other pages if it makes sense for the user. For example, if a 404 page is an article about belgian beers, you could redirect that to another article about belgian beers so that the user lands on a relevant page. You should definitely try to avoid mass redirecting links to your homepage because Google can treat these as 404s - there is a video here on the topic:

http://www.davidsottimano.com/internal-301-homepage-treated-404-google/

If a page 404s and can't be redirected to a relevant page, then it's best to leave it as a 404 and let Google keep crawling it.

I also agree with the other guys on creating a custom 404 page which will provide a good user experience if they happen to land on it.