Crawl Issue for Deleted Pages

[soralsokal]

Hi,

sometimes, I just delete a page and not necessarily want to make a 404 to another page.

So Google Webmaster Tools shows me 108 'not found' pages under 'Crawling Errors'.

Is that a problem for my site?
Can I ignore this with good conscience?
Shall I make 404 to my homepage?

I am confused and would like to hear your opinion on this.

Best, Robin

[Hannah_Smith]

Hi Robin,

Just wanted to clarify - when you delete a page and googlebot tries to access that URL it returns a 404 (not found) response - i.e. those pages you're deleting are 404-ing.

I'm assuming you're asking whether or not you should return a custom 404 page (see guidance here). Creating a useful custom 404 page is a good idea as it helps visitors to your site find an appropriate alternative to the page you've deleted. This often a better solution than just displaying your homepage.

Depending on why you're deleting these pages you might elect to 301 redirect any outdated URLs to the current version of the content (rather than just letting these pages 404) - more on this later.

You also asked if these 404s can cause you problems. Obviously 404s can cause problems for users - if they can't find the content they're looking for, chances are they may elect to leave your site and go somewhere else to find whatever they need.

From an SEO perspective, allowing pages you no longer wish to be indexed 404 is fine. However, when you delete a page you should also ensure that you remove the page from your sitemap and also remove any links to the page across your site. However you should be careful with letting some pages 404. Rand wrote a post way back in 2009  essentially he highlights that if a page has good links from external sources, and/or, is receiving substantive traffic and/or has an obvious URL visitors or linking sites intended to reach then you should 301 redirect to an appropriate page.

I hope this helps,

Hannah