Fixing 404s

[Fubra]

One of our sites is littered in 404s and I have the lucky task of clearing them up. I'm using a mixture of 410s and 301s. Party central, I know.

Wondered what ways people measure the success of clearing these 404s up on your site?

Whether this is CTR or rankings... do you look at site benefits outside of your console errors coming down?

Basically trying to understand how much this is worth doing and how to measure it's progress in real terms.

Thanks!

[GastonRiera]

Hi Fubra!

First of all, you should consider the intent of those 404 pages. What were their goals? Conversion? Completion of a form?
Then, as you said that some are being R301, anlayze if those redirection are being taken well by Google and the rankings for those URLs are improving and/or started appearing in the searches that used to lead to a 404.

Secondly, in my opinion, the two more improtant metric to always consider are:

• Rankings, if you do not improve rankings or, in the case of being in a high traffic and too competitive search, do not maintain the ranking, then you might be doing something wrong.
• Conversions, always, the main goal is to convert more and/or more efficiently. Of course this meas that you MUST understand what a conversion is for every site and for every part of the site. Then, set up the correct triggers in your analytics tool and measure the improvement.

And last but not least, Google doesnt like 404s, unless that is what the user is intended to get, so its an always on taks in any SEO project.

Hope it helps.
Best Luck.
GR

[Fubra]

Thanks GR,

It's tricky since our pages are information based - we're not providing a form or selling a product. And there are thousands of these historic 404s to work through!

But sounds like it is worth working our way through, thank you!

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[Fubra]

I'm getting into the habit of fixing them where i can - if the page is linked from anywhere and fixing/ redirecting if i can.

Then i'm marking them as fixed in search console repeatedly - any pages I'm very worried about, I recrawl via the 'fetch as google' with the hope that google will recognise them as gone.

On reading google documentation, it says that 404s won't necessarily harm your site and 'in most cases' should be left to 404. so basically i'm trying to use the tools available to us to read what errors might be there and fixing the ones that are worth fixing.

I know what you mean about having loads of frustrating 404s - as an seo trying to find things to fix, it's an absolute nightmare. but try marking them as fixed and recrawling them if necessary?

perhaps also - since your site is ecom, making a canonical campaign whereby you can canonicalise the most up-to-date product and maybe creating a custom 404 page. like "this is a 404, but here's some similar products you can browse, <a>red shirt</a>, <a>blue shirt</a> etc. hope that helps?