Hello Everybody, Please tell me how I can deal with 404 errors. I have more than 600 Not Found errors in one of my blogs. Now what should I do? I do not think redirecting so many pages individually make any sense. How can I handle bulk errors using robot.txt. Please help me if you have fixed the error earlier. Thanks
Persistent 404 errors on your CheckUpDown account indicate a fundamental problem that may not be easy to resolve. If you do see lots of 404 errors, then please contact us (email preferred) so we can help you to sort them out. Unfortunately this may take some time, because we may have to liaise with your ISP and the vendor of the Web server software to agree the exact reason for the error.
Actually, it is not any particular folder. I deleted some tags,changed categories,changed post parmalinks and all these have resulted in more than 600 Not Found items in Google Webmasters. I thought wordpress will automatically redirect bots to new address. But something like tags that I deleted was in huge number and causing 404 error. What will be the best way to get rid of the issue. Custom 404 page or something in robot.txt file?
You can use a 301 redirect to redirect the pages to other content of your site. You do this through your .htaccess file and if there is a pattern (like every URL that was mysite.com/category/name is now mysite.com/name) you can redirect many pages at once using regular expressions. I'm not an expert on .htaccess access rules but if you Google it or ask around you can probably figure out how to write something to fit your needs. There are also some wordpress plugins that allow you to manage 301 redirects (I believe one is called "redirection"). In general I don't think 404s are a huge concern. It's natural for any site to have some 404s. You want to make sure that you aren't linking to any 404 pages since that's bad for your users and a waste of "link juice." If other sites are linking to your 404 pages, that's where a 301 redirect will help by passing most of the link juice on to the page you are redirecting to.
Find out where the links are that are generating the 404's. If they are internal, fix them. If external, do a 301 redirect for every incoming link so you fix the 404 and preserve the value of the incoming link.
Actually, the problem is internal. I deleted plenty of unwanted tags. Now it is not possible to use 301 redirect to say 500 pages. I do think 404s are not major issues but who knows Google started considering these errors these days.
You can Create own or Custom 404 Not found page. ****following code paste in .htaccess file # Create 404 Error Page ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.htm and then notfound.htm file redirect on index.htm
Thank you very much. That is what I was looking for. But is this the best way? Or there are some other ways of doing that. Manual redirecting is not an option in this case using any plugin. What you think?
Actually you don't need to redirect the custom 404 page to the home page. The custom page should display your main nav menu so the visitor can easily navigate your site.
Yes it is the best way (with dcristo's advice of not redirecting to the homepage and leaving it as a standalone page). Based on what you have said, these tags that you have deleted no longer exist so there is no point in setting up a 301 redirect. The only time you should use a 301 is if the page has moved, otherwise leave it as a 404 because thats what it is, it no longer exists and Google will stop crawling it providing all references to it have been removed.
Thank you very much. That would be the best option.Placing navigation and may be sidebar and footer intact I may make it bit easier for visitors to browse though the site for some other topics.
Make one 404 page and then add 404 redirect code when ever URL reach 404 page it will be redirect on home page.