Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Expired domain 404 crawl error
-
I recently purchased a Expired domain from auction and after I started my new site on it, I am noticing 500+ "not found" errors in Google Webmaster Tools, which are generating from the previous owner's contents.Should I use a redirection plugin to redirect those non-exist posts to any new post(s) of my site? or I should use a 301 redirect? or I should leave them just as it is without taking further action? Please advise.
-
If the content isn't there, you can setup a 410. That will tell the search engines and users that the pages are gone for good. GWT will also show broken links to your site as well. So you will want to distinguish between the inbound 404s and the pages that are no longer there.
There's a possibility that the pages have been gone for so long, they're no longer indexed. So I'm not really sure how much good a 301 will do from a link perspective. However, if you have access to referral data - you may find some of those inbound 404s are worth redirecting to a relevant page.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog.
We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog. This was done with the purpose of gaining backlinks to our main website as well along with to our blog. This set us very low in organic traffic and not to mention, lost the backlinks. For anything, they are being redirected to 301 code. Kindly suggest changes to bring back all the traffic.
Technical SEO | | arun.negi0 -
Yoast SEO. After set up 404 error pages
Hello all, Something strange happened with my blog site. I recently signed to MOZ tools. Initially everything was fine, but during my last crawl I got loads of 404
Technical SEO | | A_Fotografy
pages. Few days ago I was tweaking some settings in SEO plugin according to this post https://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success What I noticed was that 404 pages were coming from my blog posts, but for
some reason category was missing in those posts. For example this link is 404
https://a-fotografy.co.uk/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie The one with category is https://a-fotografy.co.uk/wedding-pictures/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie/ So basically for some reason category was missing. Please let me know how can I fix this instead of doing hundreds of
redirects now. Thank you,
Regards,
Armands0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
How big is the problem: 404-errors as result of out of stock products?
We had a discussion about the importance of 404-errors as result of products which are out of stock. Of course this is not good, but what is the leverance in terms of importance: low-medium-high?
Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG0 -
Backlinks that we have if they are 404?
Hi All, Backlinks that we have if they are 404? Open site explorer shows 1,000 of links and when I check many are 404 and those are spammy links which we had but now the sites are 404 I am doing a link profile check which is cleaning up all spammy links Should i take any action on them? As open site explorer or Google still shows these links on the searches. Should we mention these URL's in disallow in Google webmaster. Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Checkout on different domain
Is it a bad SEO move to have a your checkout process on a separate domain instead of the main domain for a ecommerce site. There is no real content on the checkout pages and they are completely new pages that are not indexed in the search engines. Do to the backend architecture it is impossibe for us to have them on the same domain. An example is this page: http://www.printingforless.com/2/Brochure-Printing.html One option we've discussed to not pass page rank on to the checkout domain by iFraming all of the links to the checkout domain. We could also move the checkout process to a subdomain instead of a new domain. Please ignore the concerns with visitors security and conversion rate. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | PrintingForLess.com0 -
Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?
I've been getting 73 "title missing or empty" warnings from SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic. This is weird as I've installed yoast wordpress seo plugin and all posts do have title and meta description. But why the results here.. can anyone explain what's happening? Thanks!! Here are some of the links that are listed with "title missing, empty". Almost all our blog posts were listed there. http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-here-for-good/ http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-socially-awkward/
Technical SEO | | JasonDGreat
MaeM3.png TLcD8.png
0 -
How to 301 multiple domain names to a single domain
Hey, I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck. So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G. It looks like this: www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com. My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record. What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless? Thanks, Anthony
Technical SEO | | Grenadi0