Google: 404-Fehler nicht immer fatal

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Wie John Muller in der letzten Episodes seiner SEO Snippets Videoreihe eröffnete, sind 404-Fehlermeldungen aus SEO-Sicht “absolut in Ordnung”, wenn es sich um veraltete Seiten handelt, die weder intern noch extern verlinkt sind und somit auch keinen Traffic mehr empfangen.

Tun sie es doch, seien Weiterleitungen jedoch nach wie vor die richtige Maßnahme.

Mehr Infos dazu im Video.

Hier sein Statement im schriftlichen O-Ton:

“In your server logs, or analytics, check for traffic to those URLs. If there’s no traffic, that’s great. In Search Console check for links to those URLs. Are there no relevant links? That’s great too. If you see nothing special in either the links, or the traffic, having those pages return 404 is perfectly fine.

If you do see traffic to those URLs, or see links pointing at those URLs, check where they’re coming from and have those links point at the new URLs instead. Or, if it looks like a lot of traffic or links are going to those URLs, perhaps putting a redirect back in place would be more efficient.

That works for a few crawl errors, but what if you have a ton of 404 errors? Search Console makes this easy; it prioritizes crawl errors for you. If the top errors in the report are all irrelevant you can rest assure there is nothing more important further down on the list. Crawl errors for 404s that you don’t want to have indexed don’t negatively effect the rest of your site in search. So take your time to find a good approach that works for you.”

(Titelbild: Copyright © Shutterstock/MoNuttanit)