#4367 – batch processing for gathered 404 urls ?

Hi

1 -

to select each one or all bad urls and redirect thoses to just one url of your choice (e.g. home page).

This is catastrophic from an SEO standpoint and you should absolutley never do that. A missing URL should have a 404, so that search engines can update their index.

2 - There is no facility in sh404SEF to batch redirect, precisely because of #1. We however have a SEO-friendly, very powerful redirection feature set, called "Aliases". It's called "alias" because an alias can be either a redirect or a canonical link. They are described in details on this page of the documentation. This is what you should use when changing a group of articles from one category to another, or otherwise changing your site content or structure.

In other cases, such as those nearly random 404s that you have on your screenshots, you should nothing as a 404 is the proper response for those URLs.

Rgds

Hi

=> So I would redirect thoses 3 urls to homepage to avoid 404 pages on next attempts on same urls.

That's the point. This is an exact example (hack attempts) where you should never, ever redirect. A 404 is the response you must give to hack attempts, it's the most efficient (you are wasting your server power for reach redirect, it has to load Joomla and most of your site to do that redirect) and secure thing to do.

You mean it's better to let 404 pages ?

yes, totally, 150%.

Because we often read that 404 pages are bad for SEO.

That's just totally wrong. 404 are good for search engines, they ask for that: any non-existing page should give a 404.

You should redirect only:

- when you change an article URL
- you change articles from category to another
- you change your URL structure

So you should redirect when the content still exists, but you moved it to some other address for whatever reason. You can also redirect in some cases not for SEO but for your visitors: for instance, you have a well indexed page to an article or a product, and you stopped making this product, but you want them to go to another similar product, or a page that explains something about this product.

Rgds