404 appearing in Sitelinks
-
I am little embarresed to say that the custom 404 page is appearing in a client's Sitelinks for their brand name search term.
I have demoted this page from Sitelinks for the brand term but it still appears
What is the best practise for a custom 404 page appearing in a sitemap and/or being blocked by robots.txt?
Thanks
-
Thanks Tim, great shout. Just checked and you were right. Bit slap on the wrists all round.
Thanks again!
-
Just thinking - does the 404 page return a correct 404 response in the header? i.e. make sure it's not returning a 200 ("this is a legit page") response
-
What I mean to say is that within a few days after the 301 is set, Google will either update the URL or if they find a better page that should be the site-link instead of the new 301'd URL, it will update. It's just sort of seemless. Did that a couple months ago and worked like a charm.
-
Thanks Nakul - but the issue is with the 404 page itself being indexed (as it appears in the sitemap), then this page being used as one of the sitelinks for a brand search term.
I agree 301 should be put in place for any 404s seen on the site
-
The best best in my opinion would be to do a 301 redirect for the 404 URL to the correct/updated page if you have one.
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
-
Cookies disabled pointing to a 404 page
Hi mozzers, I am running an audit and disabled cookies on our homepage for testing purposes, this pointed to a 404 http response? I tried on other pages and they were loading correctly. I assume this is not normal? Why this is happening? and could this harm the site's SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Taysir0 -
Why is my entire page appearing as a video result (and only a video result)?
A page on my site is appearing as a video result. When you click on the link, it takes you to the page. The page does have a video on it, but it seems weird that the entire page would appear as (and only as) a video...
Technical SEO | | andrew.baldinger0 -
Weird 404 errors in Webmaster Tools
Hi, In a regular check with Webmaster Tools, I have noticed some weird 404 errors, for example, my domain URL is something like http://domainname.com/, the 404 error points to some weird URLs like http://domainname.com/james-bond&page=2/ and http://domainname.com/juegos-de&page=3/, at first I have tried to block them by robots.txt, but now I am getting these kind of 404 errors a lot, and don't think blocking them all is a perfect solution. Can anyone help me out with the issue? Thank you in advance.
Technical SEO | | nishthaj
cheers.0 -
Organic Sitelinks
Hi. I am looking after a website in Ireland called CarsIreland.ie When you search "carsIreland", I come number 1 and the organic sitelinks appear however When you search "cars Ireland", I come number 1 and the organic sitelinks Do Not appear why?
Technical SEO | | Rossconlon0 -
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://mza.seotoolninja.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 -
Robots.txt - "File does not appear to be valid"
Good afternoon Mozzers! I've got a weird problem with one of the sites I'm dealing with. For some reason, one of the developers changed the robots.txt file to disavow every site on the page - not a wise move! To rectify this, we uploaded the new robots.txt file to the domain's root as per Webmaster Tool's instructions. The live file is: User-agent: * (http://www.savistobathrooms.co.uk/robots.txt) I've submitted the new file in Webmaster Tools and it's pulling it through correctly in the editor. However, Webmaster Tools is not happy with it, for some reason. I've attached an image of the error. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm managing another site with the exact same robots.txt file and there are no issues. Cheers, Lewis FNcK2YQ
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
"HTTP error: 404 not found" submitting YOAST SITEMAP
When I upload the YOAST site map to google webmaster i get "HTTP error: 404 not found" just for the portfolio tag and categories..For other things iI dont get any i kinf of errors Is it because i dont have any tags and categories of portfolio element? I have to say in my template I have the portfolio post option but im not using it. Tx
Technical SEO | | tourtravel0 -
Google showing a Cached option but then giving a 404
2 weeks ago my home page plus some others had a 301 redirect to another domain for about 1 week (due to a hack).The original pages were then de-indexed and the new bad domain was indexed and in effect stole my rankings.Then the 301 was removed/cleaned from my domain and the bad domain was fully de-indexed via a request I made (this was 1 week ago).Then my pages came back into the index but without any ranking power.Now when I perform a search for my domain my home page is listed with an option to view the Cache. Clicking on the Cache brings up a 404 error.So why is Google showing the Cached option but doesn't have the cached file? How do I get Google to properly update it's Cache or show a cached copy?
Technical SEO | | Dantek0