404 (not Found) Errors Bad For SEO? Options

[saschaeh]

Been working furiously on my site and now google is not finding 33 pages - previously I had zero 404's. They giving the old 404 error. I noticed this in the Google Webmaster Tools.

Are these pages that where indexed and now there are no pages there? How does it work? I assumed that if there is a link to a page that does not exist it will pick up the 404.

What does this mean for my SEO?

What should i do about it?

Thanks - Sascha

[DianeV]

Saschaeh, the first thing is to determine a few things:

- Are those pages still on your server?
- Are all the links to those pages correct?
- Is it possible that, when Google last visited, they weren't accessible?

If these are important pages, I'd ensure that they're there, and that the links are correct.

If you can pull your server logs, search for the 404s and determine which pages may have incorrect links to them.

This post has been edited by DianeV: Oct 9 2007, 03:59 AM

[Optimized.org]

I agree with DianeV, you need to discover what these pages are and how Google is finding them. If you've moved them, 301 to the new page. It's also a good idea to ask anyone who is linking to them to update their links.

Dan

[projectphp]

Get xenu link sleuth and run it over your site, and make sure.

[saschaeh]

Thanks Guys.

Sorry late reply i have only had a chance to get around to dealing with this now.

They are all dead links from a test folder i used a while back which got indexed.

They do all have a live corresponding page which i can point them too so ill create 301 for all these 404 pages in the .htaccess file, right?

Projectphp - Thanks about Xenu will check it out.

This post has been edited by saschaeh: Oct 17 2007, 01:16 AM

[AbleReach]

They do all have a live corresponding page which i can point them too so ill create 301 for all these 404 pages in the .htaccess file, right?

That's what I would do.

If the new files have the same names, you can do something like this to redirect the whole directory at once:

CODE

redirect 301 /directory/ http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/

One exception would be if the test folder is for a site that is now hosted on its own domain, and the domain belonged to a customer. I'd consider either forwarding to the customer's domain or a portfolio page on my site that mentioned the customer's domain.

[saschaeh]

Great thanks - I didnt actually know i could redirect entire folders and contents. I knew you could do that with robots.txt but not with 301.

Saved me a good 28 lines of code

As i started doing it i dawned on me that i cant then direct each page to its relevant page so ill need to do each page individually.

How long do i keep these redirects up there for?

This post has been edited by saschaeh: Oct 17 2007, 02:17 AM

[AbleReach]

How long do i keep these redirects up there for?

Oh... forever or until they are made obsolete by other changes? I've been pickier about that on sites I own than on sites where someone would need to pay me for line after line of 301, because labors of love tend to have bigger budgets for little nudges.

[joedolson]

You can still redirect an entire folder using a single line, as long as the file names are unchanged:

CODE

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule  ^domain.com/folder/(.*)$  http://www.domain.com/newfolder/$1 [r=301,nc]

Or something to that effect.

As to how long to keep a 301 in effect? As long as the destination file exists. I don't consider it worth my trouble to check whether a page is still indexed, as long as that page is forwarding to the right place!