404 error pages are really affecting the search engine rankings. So is there any way to get rid of them . Can we redirect them to the index page using robots or in some other way ?? Please help me in that regard.
yes you can...you can do some 301 and 302 redirection. got really no knowledge on how to do it right now but its the advisable thing to do especially for 404 pages.
Please someone tell me how to redirect 404 error pages to index page using robots or some other method. I m using wordpress on my site.
404 pages actually help your rankings by eliminating old pages from the index. Can you be more specific about how you feel the 404 pages are hurting you? Are you talking about something similar to a site redesign where the old site is completely gone and you want to pass rankings to the new site? If so, you want to use 301 redirects, typically through your .htaccess on an Apache server.
They are seen to be duplicate content pages.I have 600 error pages.So i want to redirect them to index page. For example the error page is http://domain.com/category/b/c/ If we use below code in .htaccess Redirect 301 /category/ http://domain.com it will redirect only http://domain.com/category/ but will not redirect further levels like http://domain.com/category/a/ or http://domain.com/category/a/b/ so i want to redirect all such to index page. Plzz tell how to reddirect them.
Most hosting services allow you to create your own custom 404 error page and upload it to their servers. Why not check into this, then create one that has an automatic redirect or a clickable link to redirect to your index.
you can redirect only throw the hosting account. if it is your domain its your hosting. so you can do with it as you like. normaly every hosting account have the redirecting method or the exit page. if it is not yours you cannot do any thing with it. by the way a host most support you all the way or have another one.
It's not the 404 pages that are the problem - it's the missing pages. What you need to do is use a 301 redirect from each old page to a new destination. Like I said, you have to do this for each page you want to redirect.
If you are sending the right headers for your 404 page they shouldnt be effecting your rankings at all. Make sure you are sending 404 Not Found This is the only way Google will know to eliminate the requested page from their index. You dont need to worry about any redirects
tonybogs, that's not necessarily true. In this case, the original poster WANTS to retain his ranking and PageRank, which means he has to use a 301 redirect for each link.
Create a php page with the following, but change www.example.com to the site you want it to redirect to (in this case your homepage) and save it as 404.php Then open notepad and paste this: Then save it as a .htaccess file. Upload both files to your site and this should solve your problem of users going to error pages on your site
Ah ok I have mis understood the post then Although I think simply redirecting the pages isnt the best option. A user will be clicking on a link, expecting to go somewhere but instead they will be sent to the homepage which might not be relevant at all. A nice tip and one that i used recently, if a user went to my 404 page from google i actually parsed the referring query string to find the search term, i fed this into my sites search engine and it returned a bunch of relevant products. Then in the 404 page i put "Unfortunately the product you are after has been removed but the links below might interest you" Then i listed all of the products on my site relating to the users search term. It keeps the page relevant and its much more likely they will stick around. Hope this helps
Actually to redirect to the homepage on a 404 you don't have to make new files or anything, just: ErrorDocument 404 /index.htm However redirecting to home isn't a good solution, if i clicked a link on your site "expecting" to go somewhere and it went to your homepage i'd just think you site was broken and leave. Redirect to your sitemap is better, this way people can find what they are looking for and spiders have a ton of internal links to crawl. Also Op, you can specify director in .htaccess so if you renamed your /category/ to say /section/ all requests to category supages will go to section subpages. Using: Redirect /olddirectory http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/ This will have a global effect on all subpages in the /olddirectory/ folder tree.
301 permanent redirects will update the bookmarks on the search engines. the HTML code for it isn't too hard. Just search for it and you will find it. Make sure you do a 301 because a 302 is only a temporary redirect which does not update bookmarks.
As said i have redirected error pages to my sitemap page. But will this also remove the error pages from google index. I want to get rid of error pages created due to stopping of multi language plugin.
Google takes a long time to remove pages. If i had of known what you were doing with this before hand, my advice would of been to leave the Multi Language plugin in place and block the URLs with robots.txt That way no error pages, the URLs would get removed, PR all goes to the English pages and other language users can still choose their selected language to view the site.