Hi all, I'm wondering what your opinion is on how to handle "bad external links". With bad external links I mean in this case external links that cause 404's in Google wm tools because the page they link to does not exist. In some cases, I request the external link to be corrected, in other cases I might make a 301 redirect. However, I have also cases like these, a 404 indicating that this url cannot be found: www.mydomain/warning_this_is_english_domain_to_solve_this_problem_submit_site_in_atoall.com.html This is clearly some way of spamming, the person that put this link online seems to hope that you take the suggested action after noting the 404. What should I do with such a 404? I can think of three options: - ignore it and do nothing at all so leave the 404 as it is - 301 redirect the specified url to my homepage - return a 410 (gone) header for this url What would you do? I you have still a different solution please also share
There are many reasons you will see 404 errors in your log files. In case you forgot, a 404 error means a request was made for a file (or an object) and it did not exist.
Using an intelligent 404 error page will help Jenny. Not exactly the best representation as I really need to get round to updating it but here is an example > http://kd-mains.com/seo-god
thanks for the answers! However, this does not really my question because my main concern is how to handle this with regard to what google thinks about 404s. 404s can have a negative impact on SEO because Google can think that there are problems with your website, Google has of course a reason to list the 404s in the wm tools and that is why I want to handle them correctly. Any more opinions?