“Error 404 - Page Not Found” – This is one of the most common web errors we encounter in our daily surfing. We know that error pages have a clear negative impact on user experience, but what effect do they have on search engines?
- Are 404 pages bad for SEO ?
- Will search engines penalize sites with too many 404 status code pages?
In this article, I will look at 404 error pages from both a user and search engine perspective and recommend some best practices that companies can follow to improve their 404 error pages.
The most common reasons for 404 error pages:
404 errors can occur for a variety of reasons. Here are some of the most common reasons:
- You changed your site's permalinks or link structure. (This usually happens when you change the design or change the permalinks.)
- You removed content from your site.
- Someone linked to your site with a misspelled link or other incorrect link.
When a user or a search engine robot requests a bad page on the server, the web server typically responds with an HTTP status code 404 to let the user know that the page does not exist on the server.
Normally, search engine robots are smart and don’t pay much attention to 404 error pages. However, for real users, 404 error pages bring a bad user experience, and users usually go back and click other links.
Another downside to 404 errors is that it can cause you to miss out on important links from other domains. I’m not too worried about this, but when users visit your site through a referral link and see a 404 page, they usually leave.
Find 404 links and fix them for users and SEO:
Let’s figure out what you can do with 404 error pages and how to best handle them.
First, we need to identify any 404 pages on your blog. The best way to get started is to use Google Search Console (also known as Google Search Console). Log in to your Webmaster Tools dashboard > Crawl Errors > Not Found >
Click on any link and you will see the “Link Source” which will give you an idea of where those pages are linking from. This is also helpful for finding potential link juice on your site.
If you’re using WordPress, you can use a redirect plugin to monitor and redirect 404 error pages in your dashboard. (I use this plugin at ShoutMeLoud.) Once you have a list of 404 pages for your domain, here are some solutions for dealing with them:
- 301 redirect the link to the most relevant post/article or category. If there is no relevant post or category, proceed to the next step.
- If the error is due to a typo in a link from another domain, you can ask the webmaster to update the link, or use a 301 redirect.
- If you don’t have any relevant articles on your site with 404 links, just leave it alone. Google will eventually automatically de-index such pages.
- You can also manually remove such pages from the web index using the webmaster removal tool. However, if you have thousands of such pages, then this task will be very daunting. Therefore, I recommend that you choose the previous suggestion or the next one.
- Spice up your page with a custom 404 page. You can add a search box, display articles related to the user's search query, or display some of the most popular articles in your portal. The idea is to provide a good user experience.
Another thing to keep in mind is that if your portal has thousands of 404 pages, you don't want search engine bots to waste their limited crawling resources on those pages.
Therefore, it is best to redirect if possible or use Robots.txt to block robots from accessing these pages and then remove them using Google Webmaster Tools.
This is ideal, especially if you have removed any directories or category/tag pages from your portal.
- What is Google crawling and indexing
- How to submit a sitemap to Google
- Google Tag Manager Configuration Tutorial
404 pages are not the enemy of SEO, but having a bunch of 404 pages listed on your blog is not a good idea. My main concern with 404 pages is the poor user experience they provide. SEO is all about providing a good user experience, so we really want to work on this issue.
Related reading:
How do you handle 404 pages on your blog or website? Do you set up redirects or display a custom 404 error page? Let us know in the comments below.
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