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SEO Anti-patterns: 301 redirect all your 404s to your homepage
Sometimes I encounter new āSEO hacksā that people apply,
that are actually anti-patterns. One of these new anti-patterns I
noticed is the pattern of 301 redirecting all your 404 pages to
your homepage. Let me explain why this is a lot like cleaning up
your room by throwing everything into a drawer and what the better
solution would be.
The premise of this SEO hack
The premise of this hack is that 404 errors are counted by
Google, and that through some magic the number of errors on your
site affects your siteās overall ability to rank. The solution,
thatĀ really isnāt a solution, that people come up with is then
to startĀ 301 redirectingĀ allĀ error pages to their homepage. Let
me quote some of the reasons people give for doing this:
to siphon Google Page Rank (TM) from missing pages to the
homepage
If you care about your website, you should take steps to avoid
404 errors as it affects your SEO badly.
I have a website, every time I login to Google webmaster tools,
I found many new discovered 404 error links, the problem is not
in
404 errors itself, but when Google see them and count them for
you!
Letās be clear: weāll be the first to tell you that you
should keep an eye on your 404 errors and try to fix them where
possible. Google indeed shows a graph of your 404 errors in Google
Search Console and lowering the number of 404s on your site is
often a good idea. That doesnāt mean that your site shouldnāt
haveĀ any 404s.
Let me go back to my analogy of throwing everything into your
drawer when your dad or mom told you to clean up your room.
Everything, in this case, means not just the dirty clothes, or your
toys, but also that half emptied milk carton, that half-finished
sandwich, etc. You know what that makes your drawer when you clean
up your room like that? A mess. And soon your whole room will start
to stink because you cleaned up like that. This situation is no
different.
I verified this with Google before I wrote this article, see
John Muellerās response:
Yeah, itās not a great practice (confuses
users), and we mostly treat them as 404s anyway (theyāre
soft-404s), so thereās no upside. Itās not critically broken/bad,
but additional complexity for no good reason ā make a better 404
page instead.
(@JohnMu)
January 8, 2019
As John explains: when you do this blanket redirect, all those
URLs are treated as 404s. So none of them spread value. So the
premises listed above are all wrong. On top of that, by 301
redirecting all your 404 pages, you throw away the opportunity to
find real errors on your site and fix them.
The better solution for this problem of having too many 404s is
much more granular. You see, 404 redirects can exist for lots of
reasons, and each of those reasons has their own āsolutionā.
For instance:
Someone linked to an article and made a mistake in their URL.
If you can redirect that wrong URL to the right article: do
so.
Youāve deleted a page, you should think about that and act
properly, we have an
article on that.
Someone is trying whether your site can be hacked through a
certain URL, that 404 is 100% the right thing to serve.
You have a lot of 404s on your site because you had a broken
link in your template somewhere (all too common): fix that broken
link. Then redirect all those 404s to the right page.
Someone is typing in random URLs on your site just to see if
something exist: a 404 is right. Of course, then your 404 page
could be
helpful in guiding them to the right spot.
Unfortunately, all too common. I encountered at least 3 plugins
with major user bases on WordPress.org that do this, and only
this:
All
404 redirect to homepage
404 to
301
404
redirection
Together they account for 240,000+ sites that show this behavior
and there are probably a lot more.
Stop 301 redirecting allĀ your 404 pages
Now, donāt take this as though weāre telling you not to 301
redirect 404 errors. Weāre telling you to do it granularly.
Thereās nothing wrong with having a few 404 errors on your site,
and you should definitely keep an eye on them. The redirect
manager in Yoast SEO Premium can make this really easy to
do.
The post
SEO Anti-patterns: 301 redirect all your 404s to your homepage
appeared first on Yoast.
