404 Errors in Google

[gregharaksin]

I have a question. let's say someone deleted a bunch of price range snippets. oops. any clue as to what the google effect on the site would be if google notices a 404 error, and we then redirect the pages using a 301 redirect?

How bad is it?

[Celeste]

Hi Tim,

We actually had an outside company that I work with for some other things offer to run the report to see what was going on with our page rank drops.

they thought having those might have something to do with it, but I am not sure what program they use. REW couldn't find all of them so now we are trying to figure out how to get them removed.

My concern is if this company could run a search and find them, why can't google? Even though they don't show up on our webmaster tools, I don't get the warm fuzzies knowing they are out there somewhere.

Sorry I don't have a program name I can send you, but at least REW seems to know what yours are coming from so thats good.

we did a few suggestions that REW had so hopefully I will have a new report soon that shows the bulk of them gone.

My fingers are crossed

Ashley

[Aaron]

they thought having those might have something to do with it, but I am not sure what program they use. REW couldn't find all of them so now we are trying to figure out how to get them removed.

My concern is if this company could run a search and find them, why can't google? Even though they don't show up on our webmaster tools, I don't get the warm fuzzies knowing they are out there somewhere.

Most of your 404 pages are caused by broken links in your content. I did not see any links in there that were caused by any errors with the website coding on our end. There was some caused by that hubspot code ( which Google does not find ) the company that ran the scan likely made some program that attempted to 'spider' or simulate a spider. Google likely has spend millions of hours perfecting their spiders so they don't end up following links that are not links - like the Javascript ones the company your work with found.

One thing to remember is that theses are 404 ( Page Not Found ) errors ... meaning that Google is simply reporting that it cannot find the page. Which is a fantastic reason to make a great 404 page so the users of your site can find where they want to go. Make the site for the users and the search engines will like it also.

[Celeste]

Hi Aaron,

The ones that we can see through webmaster tools are related to broken links in content we created, so those are being fixed.

I am having them rerun the report to see if hubspot was causing the others which was the bulk of them, so hopefully that will turn up good results.

It's good to know that webmaster tools is pretty much what google is finding and we can stick to fixing those...at least most of those are fixable


You know, that is an excellent idea! Never occurred to me to change it....will do

thanks as always

ashley

[Robert Worthington]

I've been running into the 404 errors on many sites lately. Since I'm still a newbie, I'm trying to figure out if it really means anything of importance? Commenting still works, blogging still works, ect...