How frustrating is it to land on a 404 error page? We think it’s one of the most annoying things that users can experience on a website. That’s why you should do everything to prevent this from happening. Like properly deleting pages from your site and checking regularly for 404 error pages.
There are various tools you can use for that, like Google’s Search Console. It tells you which 404s bots encounter on your site. When you’ve found them, fix them! You can do so by fixing the link pointing to the page (if the cause was a wrong link) or, if that isn’t possible, create a redirect to the most fitting page.
Yoast SEO Premium makes fixing your 404s a piece of cake. You can get the 404 errors from Google Search Console straight in your WordPress install and redirect them right away. In addition to that, it adds an button in your WordPress toolbar when you’re on a 404 page, that allows you to instantly redirect that URL.
Few things more frustrating for both visitors and search engines than to hit a 404 error page. Good website maintenance prevents this.
The fourth article in our series about Google Search Console (Google Webmaster Tools) deals with the Crawl section and how to use this.
Want to delete a page from your site? This post explains the options you have when deleting a page and helps you choose the right one.
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 »
Category: Technical SEO
As an SEO or site owner, you are bound to run into redirects. Whenever you delete a page, change your URL structure or switch to a new domain, you are going to have to redirect your URLs. You have to tell search engine robots that there has been a change in your URLs and that »
Category: Technical SEO
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. »
Category: Technical SEO
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 »
Categories: Analytics, Technical SEO
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 »
Category: Technical SEO
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 »
Categories: Content SEO, Technical SEO
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 »
Category: Technical SEO
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, »
Categories: Analytics, Technical SEO
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, »
Category: User eXperience (UX)