Users often find notices such as “Error 404 – Site not found“ or “The site you requested was not found“ on the internet.
The 404 monster has struck, and shows sites that no longer exist. This can include URLs as well as individual elements such as images, videos, or PDF files that cannot be reached.
For websites with lots of 404 pages, there's a risk that the defective URLs will use up the crawl budget of search engine bots at the cost of more important pages. Irritated visitors will also leave your website more quickly as a result of this negative user experience. Therefore, make sure that you only link to functioning webpages to avoid 404 errors at all costs.
You should regularly check your website in the Google Search Console and remove errors so that you can react quickly when the 404 monster appears. When you choose the option "crawl errors" under the tab "crawl" and enter your domain, you will learn which internal and external links are defective.
The 404 monster strikes, for example, when:
Often, online retailers have a problem when they deal in seasonal products, but do not remove the sites afterwards. The invalid URL is nevertheless visible in the SERPs. Searching for "lego batman 2017," a snippet from "videoeta.com" appears.
Figure 1: Snippet for an incorrect site
If you click on the link
http://videoeta.com/movie/awards.html?id=173676
the Googlebot gives the incorrect site. The reader, of course, goes back to the navigation but will not find any information relevant to the topic.
Figure 2: Individual 404 site
With Ryte, you can quickly identify 404 error pages and deactivate them. In the module Website Success, click on the menu point "Indexability" and then on "Status Codes." If the number on the 4xx (not found) bar is higher than zero, there is a need for action. If you click on the 4xx bar, all incorrect URLs are listed in the report underneath – in this example there are 6.
Figure 3: Status codes report in Ryte's module Website Success
In some cases, it makes sense to redirect 404 pages permanently using 301 redirect, for example, if there are pages that offer similar information to users, or to inherit link juice. However, lengthy redirects can cause new errors, and the page speed can be negatively influenced. You should always avoid internal 404 links, and you should correct incorrect links as quickly as possible. However, if you find out from your server logs or Google Analytics that a 404 page is often called up even though it is not internally linked, a backlink may be incorrect. You can either redirect this URL via 301-Redirect to a thematically appropriate, correct URL or find out from which website the backlink comes from, and and ask the owner of this website to link to the correct URL.
See to it that your internal links are not generating any 404 errors, because otherwise you are giving away valuable link juice and are creating a poor user experience. If, however, 404 error pages remain because their contents have been permanently removed, they should contain the following elements:
The Internal Linking Monster
The Slow Page Speed Monster
The Duplicate Content Monster
The Bad Canonical Tag Monster
The Orphan Page Monster
The Thin Content Monster
The Missing ALT Tags Monster
The Redirects Monster
The Hreflang Monster
Fight the 404 Monster with Ryte - analyze your website with Ryte for FREE
Published on 06/22/2017 by Eva Wagner.
Eva is an experienced content marketer. Until May 2018 she was a member of online marketing team at Ryte. Using her creativity and the knowledge of current topics, she was responsible for the German Ryte Magazine and the Ryte Wiki. She also organized Ryte’s presence at major trade fairs such as the dmexco in Cologne.
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