410 or 301 after URL update?

[Fubra]

Hi there,

A site i'm working on atm has a thousand "not found" errors on google console (of course, I'm sure there are thousands more it's not showing us!).

The issue is a lot of them seem to come from a URL change. Damage has been done, the URLs have been changed and I can't stop that... but as you can imagine, i'm keen to fix as many as humanly possible.

I don't want to go mad with 301s - but for external links in, this seems like the best solution?

On the other hand, Google is reading internal links that simply aren't there anymore. Is it better to hunt down the new page and 301-it anyway? OR should I 410 and grit my teeth while google crawls and recrawls it, warning me that this page really doesn't exist?

Essentially I guess I'm asking, how many 301s are too many and will affect our DA? And what's the best solution for dealing with mass 404 errors - many of which aren't attached or linked to from any other pages anymore?

Thanks for any insights

[GastonRiera]

Hi Fubra!

There are some things to say here:

• Google can handle up to 5 redirects, so if you are under that number, you are fine.
• Serving 404's to google is not wrong neither will impact negatively in your rankings. But only give google a 404 only if that's the correct answer to the user.
• GoogleBot re-crawls from time to time every URL that has discovered in your website lifetime. The only URLs that will not re-crawl are those that you served a 410. HANDLE WITH CARE, 410 are too powerful.
• Redirects and DA are differents things. Dont know the new Mozscape Algorithm, I do not think that redirects would impact negatively in your DA. Focus in trying not to get GoogleBot angry or close some doors.

That said, my advice is: Crawl, scrape or manually get all those old URLs and analyze them. Then decide, whether to: 301, 404 or 410. Also, I'd give a little time to create a really powerful, interesting and userfriendly 404 page, so if some user land there they can keep being in your site and there is no bonces.

To back what i'm saying about how many redirections, Matt Cutts said it in these videos:
Can too many redirects from a single URL have a negative effect on crawling? Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site?

Hope it helps.
Best Luck.
GR

[Fubra]

That's really helpful thank you.

Based on the videos you sent, I'll keep 301ing these pages to take the user to the right place!

When you say 410s are "too powerful", can you elaborate? Some old blog posts or non-existant pages (with no updated page to redirect users to) I've 410ed. Would you recommend something else?

[GastonRiera]

Yeah, of course I can explain more.

HTTP 410 status code tells google that you've eliminated that page and will never be live again.
So google will kill that URL in its database and never ever crawl it again. Thus said, GoogleBot follows assumptions that site is working poorly or that there is some big problem.
How can this happen? when you have a massive amount of 404, 301 redirects, 410, 5xx you might have your site downgraded, possible deindexed, reduced bot crawling frequency or any other penalty you might imagine.

Some info about 410 status code:
HTTP/1.1 status code definitions

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR