2.3 million 404s in GWT - learn to live with 'em?

[ufmedia]

So I’m working on optimizing a directory site.  Total size: 12.5 million pages in the XML sitemap.  This is orders of magnitude larger than any site I’ve ever worked on – heck, every other site I’ve ever worked on combined would be a rounding error compared to this.

Before I was hired, the company brought in an outside consultant to iron out some of the technical issues on the site.  To his credit, he was worth the money: indexation and organic Google traffic have steadily increased over the last six months.  However, some issues remain.  The company has access to a quality (i.e. paid) source of data for directory listing pages, but the last time the data was refreshed some months back, it threw 1.8 million 404s in GWT.  That has since started to grow progressively higher; now we have 2.3 million 404s in GWT.

Based on what I’ve been able to determine, links on this particular site relative to the data feed are broken generally due to one of two reasons: the page just doesn’t exist anymore (i.e. wasn’t found in the data refresh, so the page was simply deleted), or the URL had to change due to some technical issue (page still exists, just now under a different link).  With other sites I’ve worked on, 404s aren’t that big a deal: set up a 301 redirect in htaccess and problem solved.  In this instance, setting up that many 301 redirects, even if it could somehow be automated, just isn’t an option due to the potential bloat in the htaccess file.

Based on what I’ve read here and here, 404s in and of themselves don’t really hurt the site indexation or ranking.  And the more I consider it, the really big sites – the Amazons and eBays of the world – have to contend with broken links all the time due to product pages coming and going.  Bottom line, it looks like if we really want to refresh the data on the site on a regular basis – and I believe that is priority one if we want the bot to come back more frequently – we’ll just have to put up with broken links on the site on a more regular basis.

So here’s where my thought process is leading:

• Go ahead and refresh the data.  Make sure the XML sitemaps are refreshed as well – hopefully this will help the site stay current in the index.
• Keep an eye on broken links in GWT.  Implement 301s for really important pages (i.e. content-rich stuff that is really mission-critical).  Otherwise, just learn to live with a certain number of 404s being reported in GWT on more or less an ongoing basis.
• Watch the overall trend of 404s in GWT.  At least make sure they don’t increase.  Hopefully, if we can make sure that the sitemap is updated when we refresh the data, the 404s reported will decrease over time.

We do have an issue with the site creating some weird pages with content that lives within tabs on specific pages.  Once we can clamp down on those and a few other technical issues, I think keeping the data refreshed should help with our indexation and crawl rates.

Thoughts?  If you think I’m off base, please set me straight.  

[TomVolpe]

Hi,

Sounds like you’ve taken on a massive job with 12.5 million pages, but I think you can implement a simple fix to get things started.

You’re right to think about that sitemap, make sure it’s being dynamically updated as the data refreshes, otherwise that will be responsible for a lot of your 404s.

I understand you don’t want to add 2.3 million separate redirects to your htaccess, so what about a simple rule - if the request starts with ^/listing/ (one of your directory pages), is not a file and is not a dir, then redirect back to the homepage. Something like this:

does the request start with /listing/ or whatever structure you are using

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/listing/ [nc]

is it NOT a file and NOT a dir

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#all true? Redirect
RewriteRule .* / [L,R=301]

This way you can specify a certain URL structure for the pages which tend to turn to 404s, any 404s outside of your first rule will still serve a 404 code and show your 404 page and you can manually fix these problems, but the pages which tend to disappear can all be redirected back to the homepage if they’re not found.

You could still implement your 301s for important pages or simply recreate the page if it’s worth doing so, but you will have dealt with a large chunk or your non-existing pages.

I think it’s a big job and those missing pages are only part of it, but it should help you to sift through all of the data to get to the important bits – you can mark a lot of URLs as fixed and start giving your attention to the important pages which need some works.

Hope that helps,

Tom

[ufmedia]

I was actually thinking about some type of wildcard rule in htaccess.  This might actually do the trick!  Thanks for the response!