Pages leading to 404 in sitemaps

Forum Moderators: phranque

Message Too Old, No Replies

Pages leading to 404 in sitemaps

Treud

4:27 pm on Jun 24, 2019 (gmt 0)

Hi,

I have a question on a possible Doorway pages issue.

I figured out that the last 2 months my indexed pages went almost double (maybe more). I didn't add content and that was all the product attributes that were indexed.

Problem is that all these links (hundreds) were leading to a 404 page. Is this can be seen as a doorway page or thin content or anything?

Thanks in advance for your pieces of advice!

not2easy

6:33 pm on Jun 24, 2019 (gmt 0)

How and why did non-existing pages get indexed - and what have you done to "undo" that?

Problem is that all these links (hundreds) were leading to a 404 page.

Are you creating links that go to pages that do not exist or are the links a result of some error? I doesn't matter so much whether they will be "seen as doorway pages" as that they exist and would be seen as a poor user experience.

You'll need to find the cause and correct it. Content that should not be indexed should be created in a way that prevents or at least does not encourage indexing.

I have to admit that my response is based on a complete non-understanding of how/why you have links indexed or why you would have links to 404 content. I am confused.

lucy24

8:07 pm on Jun 24, 2019 (gmt 0)

all these links (hundreds) were leading to a 404 page.

Were they leading, via a redirect, to the 404 page ... or were they getting a 404 error that resulted in physically displaying the 404 page?

If you don't know, find the nearest developer and twist their arm until they tell you. The distinction is crucial.

Treud

11:13 pm on Jun 24, 2019 (gmt 0)

These products attributes are light weight, size and so on. It�s a lot.

My dev said he changed the product option by removing them from the archive (still have to see exactly how he did tha). Before you were able to click them. The point is I don�t know if they were here before but it seems that the number of all of them are matching. I dont�t how to get a history of indexed page execpt the total number.

By changing them to non clickable no link were on the website and also they were leading to a 404 page. Before you were able to sort all products with these attributes but it was really poor experience for user and useless so I said, ��all these link are useless is it possible to remove them ? It adds nothing as value for customer. So my dev remove them from the archive.

To ��fix�� that I just removed the pages from the index with meta robots. (So car for Bing look almost done).

We are talking about 700 pages on a website with usually 800 pages indexed.

I still have other issues but it�s another story :)