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#1319 – there are so many 404 pages

Posted in ‘sh404SEF’

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Thursday, 05 November 2015 11:51 UTC

mindenaron

Hello there,

There is an issue which I cannot solve on my own. The component works great but I have a lot of 404 pages that I cannot do anything with. Please see the attached jpg.

I tried to purge these 404 pages from the databes but they are generated over again. The point is that I changed the urls by changing the aliases of different pages, and over the years there were a lot of changes on my site.
For example there were a lot of articles that later I deleted. However, these pages appear as 404 errors whatever I do. I know I can enter a custom sef url but simply it is too much to start doing that with 10.000+ 404 pages.
I'm not sure I'm asking well but is it possible to get rid of these 404 errors, or what is the most effective way of dealing with these so many 404 errors.
I thought if I purge these from the database, they wont come up again.
Could you help me out with some useful tips?
Regards
Aron

Friday, 06 November 2015 09:09 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

There's no real problem here. As you can see on the screenshot, all the 404s are external, ie they come from other people. Two years ago someone bookmarked a page on your site. Then you changed that link, so now when they use this bookmark, they get a 404 and this is recorded.

There are 2 conclusions to draw from that:

1 - Never change aliases of URLsEven if you modify the content slightly, don't change the alias and don't change the URL. You must change the page title and description, but not the URL

That way, you can keep the backlinks, the SEO value in all those links you have.

It's only if you entirely change the content of a page that you should change the alias. But in that case, we're only really talking about a different page, so getting a 404 on the old is totally fine.

2 - Getting a 404, or many 404 is fine if the pages are not there any more. If the pages are still there, but you only modified them a bit, then you should not change the alias (as per #1).
But if you changed the URL, and you only modified the page content a little bit, then you must setup redirects.

To reiterate: you must setup redirects only if the new page content is similar to the old one.

Now it's very hard to that for 14000 pages, so usually what people do is check the hits counters.
Then you select the top 50 or top 100 404s, the ones with the most hits, and you setup redirects for those ones.

Hope this helps

Rgds

Sunday, 08 November 2015 19:20 UTC

mindenaron

Thank you very much for the answer. That really helped, and basically it helped me understand the way it works. That was relly the problem: I changed the aliases so a bookmarked page generated a 404 error.
I try to keep your suggestions in mind and keep the urls accordingly.

Just a quick note: I would love to see your, the developer, practical pieces of advice on how to use (or not to use) the component effectively. There are so many options but clearly there could be some guidance for guys like me, who absolutely wants to rely on your advice without the intention to go deeper in the settings and so on. So a few blog entries on how to use the component effectively and mistakey to avoid. That would be much appreciated.
Thank you again
Rgds
Aron

Monday, 09 November 2015 14:02 UTC

wb_weeblr

So a few blog entries on how to use the component effectively and mistakey to avoid. That would be much appreciated.

Actually, we're working on that. We're thin on resources outside of programming and support, but I do agree this is the best medium for this and so we have made a schedule for 5-6 blogs over the next 2 months. Keep also in mind that the real way to handle this is to hire a SEO.
Basically, sh404SEF with default settings is just as good as it gets. Then it must not be "configured well" per se, but rather "configured to your SEO strategy" (Social sharing, page titles and description creation methodology,...), so many times having a consultant may help that.

Closing this ticket now, feel free to open a new one as needed. If you do so, please mention this ticket number in the new one.

Rgds

This ticket is closed, therefore read-only. You can no longer reply to it. If you need to provide more information, please open a new ticket and mention this ticket's number.