404 errors High Priority Issues in Moz Pro: change to 301 or not ?

[isabelledylag]

Hi there,

Moz Pro is showing us 404 errors on our site as High Priority Issues. These 404 errors regard deleted product pages, which we did not 301. Should we 301 them all backwards ?

We have an ecommerce site. After reading How Should You Handle Expired Content? on Moz and a few other Q&A discussions I now know we should 301 each expired url and now we do so. My concern is with what was done in the past, and what we should do about it:

• for the past few years we have been leaving the pages on the site, creating a big amount of outdated url's without either content nor traffic
• in march our IT decided to delete these url's, and ask for a webpage removal in Google Search Console: we 301 only a 40 url's and 404 the other 3500
• now 6 monthts after, we still have 2500 crawl errors in the Search Console, and Moz Pro finding each week new 404 errors

Our SEO consultant says we should not bother about the errors shown in the Search Console. But I am concerned about these errors not reducing, and about Moz Pro High Priority Issues: should we 301 the url's to similar categories or products?

[Joe.Robison]

Hey Isabelle,

From the How Should You Handle Expired Content? post, I agree that those 4 steps outlined are the best questions to ask:

1. Was there significant traffic (and not just organic, but also consider direct) coming to this page?
2. How can we provide the best user experience?
3. Has this page received external links? How is this page currently internally linked to?
4. Is there content/resources on the page that users would still find useful?

Were those 40 pages you chose to 301 the only pages that were receiving any type of traffic, or are there perhaps more out of the other 3,500?

If some of those 3,500 pages have links from external websites linking to them, make it a high priority to 301 redirect those URLs to related category or product pages.

If some of those 3,500 pages are receiving decent amounts of visits to them still (you can see this in Google Analytics) then you can consider 301 redirecting those to improve UX and recover some traffic that may be bouncing. Set a threshold depending on the size of your site, maybe only recover URLs that have more than 10 visits a month or so.

As far as seeing the errors in Search Console, it can be annoying sometimes, but Google shows a lot of stuff as informational and it doesn't necessarily need to be acted upon. Here's a related question on Moz about that. If the pages are long gone, you don't have to worry about Google showing them.

But if you're wondering how Google is discovering these, it's possible there are old sitemaps they're crawling, or even pages on your site that link to those old pages. Definitely run a Screaming Frog scan on your site to try and uncover those.

[isabelledylag]

Hi Joe,

Thank you so much for your answer. As a matter of fact much of these 3,500 pages don't receive much traffic anymore, but a lot of them have natural external links since they were product pages. The problem is, I don't know how to check it.

Your informations regarding the Search Console are usefull, so I will have to live with it being full of crawl errors. But what should I do with MOZ PRO showing some of the 404 as High Priority Issues? Does it actually mean, that those url's are somehow important and should be 301 redirect? So is MOZ PRO more liable than the Search Console on this point?

[Joe.Robison]

Hey Isabelle - which do you not know how to check, the analytics for those 3,500 pages or the links to them?

For the analytics you'll just go back in time to when those pages were receiving traffic and check. To check the individual pages for backlinks pointing directly to them, you'll want to use Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, or Majestic to get that data. Using at least 2 of those will give you the best data on which pages are getting links.

I would investigate as to which metrics Moz Pro is using to decide if those pages are high priority to fix. It could be that Moz Pro is basing the high priority signal on the backlinks, so dive deeper into that to find out what's triggering that and then fix that problem!

[AaronHemmelgarn]

Hi Joe,

When running a scan to find error pages or bad internal linked pages, what type of scan parameters do you use? This could make sense on why I'm seeing these strange 404 error strings, such as http://website.com/ http://www.website.com/cubic-zirconia-1/ Ideas, have you seen this before?

run a Screaming Frog scan