404 Errors

A redirect happens when someone asks for a specific page but gets sent to a different page. Often, the site owner deleted the page and set up a redirect to send visitors and search engine crawlers to a relevant page. A much better approach than serving them an annoying, user experience breaking 404 message. Redirects …

When you delete a page (or post) from your site, you delete one or more URLs too. That old URL, when visited, will usually return a 404 not found error. But is that what you wanted? Maybe that page should be redirected somewhere. If not, and you deliberately deleted that content, serving a 410 header would actually be …

As an SEO or website owner, sooner or later you are bound to run into redirects. Whenever you delete a page, change your URL structure or switch to a new domain, you’ll have to redirect your URLs. Changing URLs is really important for your SEO, but can be quite daunting. That’s why Yoast SEO Premium …

HTTP status codes, like 404, 301 and 500, might not mean much to a regular visitor, but for SEOs they are incredibly important. Not only that, search engine spiders, like Googlebot, use these to determine the health of a site. These status codes offer a way of seeing what happens between the browser and the server. …

If your website means anything for your business, you should not forget to schedule time to do maintenance on it. Therefore we regularly write about the things you should do to keep your site in shape. In this post we’ll write about the most basic of all: checking for 404 error pages. Note: this post does not cover the required …

You’ve deleted a post or page. Of course, you know that you’re not done yet though! You’ll have to create a redirect, to avoid that visitors will land on your 404 page. Perhaps your site has a page that shows the information that you’ve just deleted, or something similar. So you want to create a redirect. But …

When you maintain a blog, you write different types of posts. Of course, you try to write evergreen cornerstone content posts all the time. The reality is different. Some posts have historical value, others only have momentary value. You should go through your archive every once in a while, and clean it up. This should …

Search engines crawl your site to get the contents into their index. The bigger your site gets, the longer this crawl takes. It’s important that the time spent crawling your site is well spent. If your site has a 1,000 pages or less, this is not a topic you’ll need to think about much. If  you intend …

The section in Google Search Console that works most closely with our Yoast SEO Premium plugin, is the Crawl section. In our premium plugin, you’ll find a Search Console section, that lists all pages Google somehow did not find on your website. You can easily import these into the plugin and redirect the ones that need redirecting, …

Have you ever wondered why you should have that 404 Not Found page? What’s the use? The page is gone or broken and you don’t want people to end up there, so why not just redirect that page to the homepage of your website? They even made WordPress plugins that will help you do this, …