404 errors

[Jimmy19]

Hi guys,

My moderators delete posts and threads on a daily basis. However, I've recently been notified by google of an increase in 404 errors in my forum because of this. What can I do about these 404 errors? Is there a code I can put in the htaccess to redirect the 404 errors to the forum homepage? What is my best option?

 

[dutchbb]

That is normal and correct signal to google, 404 means the thread/page is deleted. Those will go away if there isn't an internal or external link to them.

Do not redirect them to homepage, that is bad for seo. The 404 pages of xenforo are the right way to handle this, google can crawl other links from there.

 

[usAdultAds]

That is normal and correct signal to google, 404 means the thread/page is deleted. Those will go away if there isn't an internal or external link to them.

Do not redirect them to homepage, that is bad for seo. The 404 pages of xenforo are the right way to handle this, google can crawl other links from there.

I would think 404 is bad for SEO (bad user experience)
so why would redirecting 404 to home be any worse?
at least the visitor is taken somewhere other than a dead-end page.

 

[dutchbb]

I would think 404 is bad for SEO (bad user experience)
so why would redirecting 404 to home be any worse?
at least the visitor is taken somewhere other than a dead-end page.

Only if there are many internal or external links pointing to that page. Removing the internal links is something you could do then for user experience. For external (backlinks) you could request to the webmaster of the website, but you will lose the link. Pages will get deleted and google factors this in, so you don't have to do that for every link. Letting google know that the page is removed is a good thing so they can remove that from the index.

Google also states that redirecting 404 pages to the home page is bad for seo because it has nothing to do with the original page and google will not know that page has been deleted (only redirected). You could redirect to similar pages

 

[dutchbb]

John Mueller form google said it btw. It is about site moves and redirecting old url's, but the principal is the same.

Google: Redirecting All Your URLs To Your Home Page Is A Bad Practice
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-redirect-urls-home-26270.html

Google does not crawl the 404 page itself (did not know that). But for user experience it is good. With xenforo you can go directly to other pages or use the search form the 404 as google states is a good way to do it.
http://www.thesempost.com/google-doesnt-crawl-see-404-pages-no-seo-benefit/

And the pages google knows are 404's are crawled less.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-404-status/254429/

Also when you remove a page without any links to it google will still have it in their crawlindex and this takes some time to be removed. Those 404's will drop over time in your search console and redirecting these is not necessary. You can check if there are any links pointing to it.

If there are many internal links pointing to that page means it was an important page. Best to redirect to a similar page then or remove the links. I would not bother for a few links. For backlinks the same, but redirecting to the homepage will not work on google. They know what you are trying to do.

 

[dutchbb]

You could also block /goto links (quotes) in your robots.txt or add nofollow to them. Because when a post is deleted a quote to that will have a 404 to it. Also no use letting google crawl these, only if they know it is a quote to a post this way.

But most of the time your mods will delete the quotes to it so nothing to worry then.