I have remove some low quality pages from my site, then Google web master tools show I have 31 404 errors, it will affect my PR ? How can I remove these errors ? Thanks
it affects PR of site, first of all go to link checker tool and type your site and find broken link after removing all broken link you can resolve your problem and PR can be increase
Chandra.seo is correct. You should also put up pages in place of the old ones with just a link to your homepage. After that it's just a matter of being patient.
Well, PR is different from rankings, but yes it can affect the rankings. If you have deep links from other websites pointing at the missing pages, then it might be a good idea to do a 301 Permanent Redirect from the old pages to either different pages within the site that are similarly themed, or to the homepage. This way you will retain the value gained from the deep links. Either way, definitely remove any links from within your site that point to the missing pages. A friend of mine turned me on to Xenu Link Sleuth, which is free, and I highly recommend that for checking broken links, both within your site and to pages on other peoples sites that you might be linking to. -Michael
If it is returning a 404 status code then that is what can hurt your rankings from what I understand, and from the way it was explained to me. -Michael
I just checked and I have 1 404 error. That was just fixed. Thanx guys, didn't think about checking for errors in a long time. It is a huge site and would have errors at times.
in my opinion 404 pages will not effect your page rank but if you want , you can remove them with using http://services.google.com:8882/urlconsole/controller?cmd=reload&lastcmd=login
It affects your PR, but only for those pages which have been removed. Any remaining pages of your site will not be affected.
Pages returning a 404 error will neither effect your PR nor your rankings. Returning a 404 error for a page that is no longer around is the correct header response returned. Googlebot will eventually stop looking and remove the page from the index, although the page may go supplemental and stay there for up to a year, that is if the page was cached and then removed. How could this possibly effect PR and rankings? If you are concerned then do a 301 redirect or use Google's URL removal tool, as previously mentioned. The only possible negative effect would be if you are linking to a page on your site that is no longer around and Googlebot is following these links expecting to find a page. This could be a signal of poor quality and could possibly effect rankings, but again not a site's PR.
If a page is no longer there then eventually it will lose PR, which is what TSO was saying. He wasn't saying that the site will lose PR. Now, if you have a bunch of pages that other people are linking to, and those pages are in turn linking to the homepage, and you lose those pages, then you can lose PR overall. That's easy enough to fix with a 301 tho. -Michael
I dont think 10-50 404 errors can change anything significantly for a site having thousands of content. Bu if the number increases, you can see some really bad effects in your SERP results.
I've just gone and corrected mine, i had 25 404 errors, i have a couple thousand pages indexed by G and in my own experience the 404 errors i had have no affect on serps.
Actually, you should return a 410 status code if the page is removed without any intention of bringing it back... see http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp#code-404 for a brief explanation of the difference. It will stop Google from recrawling it again and again... Yes, I agree, a high percentage of 404 errors will affect Google's view of your quality. A few will not. Removing pages can affect your PR, but the effect is much less noticeable for a site with lots of pages or a good number of strong backlinks.
NO they don't however whenever you get 404 and visitor sees that doesn't make good impression especially if this a first time visitor. Try to use 301 redirect to the new pages or just create page for 404 Error. One more thing google follows redirects but Yahoo doesn't.