404 Errors archives

Recent 404 Errors articles

6 questions about redirects for SEO

21 September 2023 Edwin Toonen

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 annoying, user-experience-breaking 404 messages. Redirects play a …

Read: "6 questions about redirects for SEO"
6 questions about redirects for SEO




Website maintenance: Check and fix 404 error pages

30 July 2019 Joost de Valk

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 …

Read: "Website maintenance: Check and fix 404 error pages"
Website maintenance: Check and fix 404 error pages

How to properly delete a page from your site

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 …

Read: "How to properly delete a page from your site"
How to properly delete a page from your site


SEO Anti-patterns: 301 redirect all your 404s to your homepage

14 January 2019 | 21 Comments Joost de Valk

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 …

Read: "SEO Anti-patterns: 301 redirect all your 404s to your homepage"
SEO Anti-patterns: 301 redirect all your 404s to your homepage

Crawl efficiency: making Google’s crawl easier

16 October 2018 | 6 Comments Joost de Valk

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 1,000 pages or less, this is not a topic you’ll need to think about much. If you intend on …

Read: "Crawl efficiency: making Google’s crawl easier"
Crawl efficiency: making Google’s crawl easier