Hi
I'm at 9600 404 URLs already. Is this a concern?
The actual number has no meaning and is of no concern. 404s are not an SEO problem in themselves.
It looks like some dynamic URLs are getting listed in the 404 list. Is there a way to prevent this, or is it normal to let these accumulate and grow. I'm not sure how to handle these. Please advise.
404s are just 404s, they have no meaning and are not the sign of a problem by themselves. It just mean that someone requested a page that does not exist on your site and this was recorded. You probably have plenty of 404s that are for WordPress files or things like that.
LIkewise for what you call "dynamic URLs". URLs are URLs, whether they have query parameters or are just a string of characters does not matter (although of course for various reasons you want to keep them short and readable as much as possible).
The only issue 404s can cause and which is why they need monitoring is when they denote a
bad link on your site or failure of an extension.
If I take the example of attacking-functional-drills/page-4, I visited: attacking-functional-drills. There I can see a pagination list where the links for page 2, page 3 , etc are:
/functional-training/attacking-functional-drills/page-2
/functional-training/attacking-functional-drills/page-3
/functional-training/attacking-functional-drills/page-4
In addition, when you go to page 2, and look up the link back to page one, it's:
/functional-training/attacking-functional-drills/
So I would think that when you were using Mijo, that page URL was
/attacking-functional-drills/
and subsequent pages were:
/attacking-functional-drills/page-2
/attacking-functional-drills/page-3
...
Either you imported the 1st page, attacking-functional-drills/ into sh404SEF, or you manually customized it, which is why the link /attacking-functional-drills/ is still working.
But page 2, 3 and 4 were not imported or customized, and so those pages are created automatically by sh404SEF following the normal structure for categories which is:
/functional-training/attacking-functional-drills/
/functional-training/attacking-functional-drills/page-2
/functional-training/attacking-functional-drills/page-3
/functional-training/attacking-functional-drills/page-4
Hence /attacking-functional-drills/page-4 does not exist. Would be interesting to know if /attacking-functional-drills/page-2 and /attacking-functional-drills/page-3 exists in the SEF URL manager and work of if they are also in the 404 list.
One way or the other, this does not denote an operational issue with the site. All works normally. What can be an issue is the change in URLs. As thoes URLs were not imported and no redirect was created, Google will need to update their index. Those are the type of 404s that you should redirect (use the Redirect to SEF button on the 404 manager) to their new version.
There's no short version to what to do with 404s. Most are no concern and do not require any action.
As you transitioned SEF extension and likely not 100% URLs were transferred as we just saw, this is what you should be monitoring and redirect those that are legits URLs from the "old" site to their equivalent on the "new" site. You can use the time period filter on the 404 URL manager to only show 404s from the last hour, last day and so on. Looking a the details of a 404 will show the User agent. If it's Googlebot, you may want to check whether the 404 is legit (ie an old, bad link) or if Google is trying to read a URL that was changed during the transfer. If so, redirect that to the new URL.
Best regards
Yannick Gaultier
weeblr.com
@weeblr
