404's - Do they impact search ranking/how do we get rid of them?

[carlystemmer]

We are using Expression Engine. A lot of the links are within our own site - they are articles we once posted, but then we decided to close for one reason or another, and now they are throwing a 404 error. We don't necessarily have anything to redirect them to since they are mostly just random article pieces, which is why we were looking into deleting them completely.

[MonicaOConnor]

404's can reduce your ability to rank highly for keywords when they effect your bounce rate and lower your impressions. Consider it giving your website a bad reputation. Again, it takes a lot of them to do this.

[carlystemmer]

When we ran the MOZ report it said we had more than a couple...probably around 50 or so. Our website has been around 5-6 years and I don't think we have ever done anything with any of them. With this many errors, what is your suggestion? Would it be faster to submit the link to Google Webmaster tools than waiting for them to be crawled again?

[MonicaOConnor]

Fix them, redirect them back to a relevant page and then mark them as fixed in GWT.

[MonicaOConnor]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tz7Eexwp_A

This is video by Matt Cutts that gives some great advice. My goal is always to redirect them, even if it is back to the main article category page or even the home page. I hate the thought of losing a potential customer to a 404 error. This has to be your decision though.

Errors are not good, no matter what kind of error they are. Best practice is to remove any error you can. When your bounce rate increases you lose ranking power. When you have broken links, you lose searchers. That is the simplest way to put it.

[adamxj2]

With that many I would suggest redirecting them to a relevant page rather than just stopping the indexing of them by submitting the links to Google Webmaster Tools. From what I've experienced, keeping the link juice flowing through your site by redirecting them is better for your overall SEO efforts.

Of course it's faster to submit the links to GWT…but that doesn't necessarily mean it's better. Regardless of what you do or how you do it, eliminating your crawl errors is very important.

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

Google's webmaster documentation says;

"Generally, 404 errors don’t impact your site’s ranking in Google, and you can safely ignore them."

When Google says "generally" this tends to mean "in most cases" or "not directly" or "there may be secondary effects"... you get the idea.

But I think they are assuming you need to be smart enough to know if the 404 was intentional, and if not why it happened. For example - if you had a really popular piece of content with back links directly to that URL, and then the URL 404s - you supposed may lose the "link juice" pointing into that article. So in that regard 404s can hurt rankings secondarily.

But as other have said, you can redirect your 404s to a similar page (Google recommends not the homepage).

I am not sure why the Moz report puts them in "high priority" - perhaps they mean "high priority" from a general web best practice point of view, and not strictly SEO.

[carlystemmer]

Is there no way to just completely remove or delete a page/404 or it will always exist on some level?

[MonicaOConnor]

Theoretically a 404 error is a deleted page. To get rid of the 404 error you have to redirect the broken link, or deleted page.

[carlystemmer]

Got it. So I guess we need to decide what makes sense work-load wise and what is best for the site. If we do 301 redirects, is that seen as more beneficial than an "engaging" 404 page that allows people to go to another page?

It seems like the 404 page would be one project where constantly adding in 301 redirects would be a lot of work.

[carlystemmer]

Interesting - good to know! So even when we submit these links to Google Webmaster tools, that doesn't solve the problem, correct? Even if Google isn't crawling these links (eventually) will it still hurt SEO rankings overall?

[evolvingSEO]

What do you mean by "submit links to Google Webmaster Tools"? As far as I know there isn't a way to submit 404 URLs in there.

The way to solve 404s are;

• make the URL a real page again (if it broke by accident)
• remove links pointing at the bad page
• 301 redirect the 404 page to one that works
• you can opt to leave it alone if there was nothing important on that page and there is no good page to redirect it to

404s might hurt rankings, but only in extreme cases where it was a popular page and now you're losing the back link value or referral traffic etc. I'd say in 90/100 cases 404s will not hurt your rankings.

[carlystemmer]

By submit to webmaster tools, I meant submit the link so Google will not crawl it again.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi

As far as I know there is no way to do this in webmaster tools. You can test your robots.txt file with the Robots.txt Tester - but you need to actually update the real file to block URLs from being crawled.

At any rate, normally you would not block 404s from being crawled - Google with either stop crawling them on their own, or this way if they are indexed they can drop out of the index.