404 Errors

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 …

If your website is important to your business, it’s essential to schedule time to keep it running smoothly. 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 errors. Note: this post does not cover the required elements of a …

Whenever you delete a page (or post) from your site, you also delete one or more URLs. That old URL, when visited, will usually return a ‘404 not found’ error, which is not the best thing for Google or your users. Is that what you really wanted to happen? You could redirect that deleted page …

If you’ve been working on your site for a while, you might have come across a soft 404 error. Google Search Console might have sent you an email notifying you of a number of soft 404 errors on your site. But what are these errors? What is ‘soft’ about a 404 error? Why do they …

Sometimes I encounter new “SEO hacks” that people apply, that are actually anti-patterns. One of these new anti-patterns I noticed is the pattern of 301 redirecting all your 404 pages to your homepage. Let me explain why this is a lot like cleaning up your room by throwing everything into a drawer and what the …

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 …

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 …

HTTP status codes, like 404, 301 and 500, might not mean much to a regular visitor, but for SEO’s 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. …

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, …