#11250 – 404 error page suggestions

Hi

It's  been designed this way - based on the 10 years experience of this feature on sh404SEF - because URLs don't mean anything to users while there's a good chance that the title will - you should have a title that let user knows what's in the target page.

Your example is very good because if a user clicked on 

https://example.nl/alles-over-systeemwanden/glazen-wanden-voor-kantoor

for instance in Google, they have no idea what the URL they clicked on is, so they can't decide which URL is better.

And that's assuming visitors

- know what a URL is, which is not true in general.

- even if they know, that they can spot the single word difference in this long URL

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

Sorry about the misunderstanding!

I'v deleted the old URL in 4SEO and run the Analyse again and now everything is working fine.

Yes, URLs in 4SEF database are left there until deleted, regardless of what you do but I'm not sure I understand this:

On my clients website I've changed the URL

How did you change the URL, if not by modifying it in 4SEF? this is the case where you want to do that because:

- you avoid this kind of trouble

- 4SEF would do an automatic 301 redirect from old to new URL, and your visitors or search engines would not be bothered by the change

When I change an URL as I did, can I set up the "old to new URL" in Joomla's Redirect plugin?

All this is automatic, if you change a URL in 4SEF, where they should be changed, so you should not have to do anything at all.

The Joomla redirect plugin is very limited and yes, if you are in a case where you want to change a URL, 4SEO redirection features (see documentation on this page) are easier and more powerful at the same time.

Also, on a somewhat related note: why did you change the URL in the first place?

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

I've changed the URL by changing the alias of the page.

Well, if you have 4SEF on a site, you don't want/need to do that.

First, in most cases, this will have no effect on the URL, because 4SEF strictly does not change a SEF URL when you change an item title/alias.

This is exactly as it should for SEO, as a URL to an item never change (if you do that, you lose all ranking that page may have in Google).

So while Joomla allows it, it's a very, very, very bad idea.

In this program you have to attach keywords to certain pages.
During this process of climbing in Google, you get advised about the page and keywords.
In this case I had to seperate the keywords with 'systeem' in it from that page.

In the content, yes. All you want.

So I also had to change the URL with 'systeem' in it and that was the reason why I changed this.

Absolutely never. You can change all the keywords you want in the page content. Just never, ever change a URL. Again: once you change the URL, Google:

- discards all information it has about the old page, as it's now a 404

- discovers the new page as a completely new item, with no backlinks, no ranking signals, no authority, nothing

In addition of course, keywords in URLs have very exactly zero SEO value, so changing the URL in that case gives you no benefit whatsoever, but instead a big SEO loss.

In the rare cases where one must change a page URL (in your case, you must not), then you minimize the loss by adding a redirect from the old URL to the new. This tells Google that the page in question has changed address, and it will - usually - transfer the old ranking signals from the old address to the new address. As this introduces a delay, and possibly a loss if you do it on too many pages, advice #1 still applies: don't change the URL.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr