The power of fixing 404s
Hello, thanks for listening to SEO tips today.
Today’s tips are all focused on 404s. You’re probably aware that 404s are broken pages on your site and they can result in a loss of traffic as real live people hit those pages and potentially bounce from your site.
All sites have 404s but sometimes you can reclaim equity from old links by fixing them and 301 redirecting them to a better location. Google needs you to redirect them to “like” content, otherwise, they will see your new 301 as a 403.
As you’re deciding where to redirect your users (from those broken pages), I usually look up the URL in the Wayback Machine to determine what content was on it, then do a site: search in Google with the domain name of your site and quotes around the topic to find the page that Google thinks is most closely related to the broken link you’re redirecting. If there’s no relevant page, you *can* redirect the link to the closest category page and hope for the best.
You can find your 404s in your favorite crawling tool (Ahrefs, ScreamingFrog, Deepcrawl – they all report on them). You want to focus on the ones that have high-quality backlinks pointing to them, or that have traffic to them.
Most of the time your standard 404 page has either “404” or “page not found” in the page title and you can easily use the page title filtering in Google Analytics (or your web analytics package of choice) to pull a report of 404s with traffic. You can also use the APIs to connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console to both ScreamingFrog and Deepcrawl before you crawl and then it will provide you with backlinks that are the highest priority to fix.
Another tip to truly find all of your high-value 404s is to use Bing Webmaster Tools reports as Bing remembers all of the URLs on your site – even if you have deleted them AND stopped linking to them. I’ve also heard that Yandex’s Webmaster Tools is useful, though I work mostly on US sites, so haven’t used that as much.
If you really want a broken page to drop out of the index, you should switch it to a 410, which means gone forever.
So that’s your tip for today – track down your 404s to work to get your traffic back and to reclaim your lost inbound link equity.
Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.
? Listen to the previous tip: Optimizing for topics and entities when writing
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