404 in google webmaster tool

[seoanalytics]

I have redesigned my website with new web address over 6 months ago and in the google webmaster tools it still shows my old urls with a reponse code 404 and still crawls those pages.

How do I make sure they don't appear anymore in the webmaster tool and don't get crawled anymore ?

or should I do a re-direct ?

Thank you,

[john4math]

You should do redirects for these pages if you can.  The probable reason they keep showing up and getting crawled is because people linked to those pages before you redid your site, and Google is continuing to come across those links.  If you 301 redirect them to their new counterparts, people will be getting to the content they're looking for when they click those links, and also the link juice from those links will pass to the new pages, so the new pages should also rank better.

[seoanalytics]

That is what I thought but how do I redirect those knowing that they don't exist on my joomla website anymore ?

[ORob]

Your 404's should filter out over time as long as you are not linking to them or listing them in your XML sitemap. It can take quite a while. 301 them if you have proper pages to do so, but if you don't - just let it play out.

Google webmaster's stance on this is that 404's are natural, and they are more of an awareness alert, than a huge issue. If you see a spike make sure it is supposed to be happening.

[john4math]

If you have new pages that are similar to your old pages, the old pages no longer need to exist.  Usually this involves putting redirects in your conf file.  I've never used Joomla, but I think the conf file would live outside of that (e.g. in Apache).

[CoreyNorthcutt]

Agree with John's response, but to add two points:

1. You can also set redirects manually via a .htaccess file if using Joomla.  The format is very simple:

redirect 301 /oldpage.html /newpage.html

It takes some time, but I'm generally of the opinion that it's worth it when these appear in GWMT.

2.  There's a feature in Webmaster Tools now to mark the errors as 'resolved'.  That can help clean things up for you.  If the errors aren't really resolved, Google states in the help documentation that they will eventually reappear for you to find again.