On June 25, the author published an article "Smartly Using 301 Redirects to Convert 404 Errors into Website External Links" and talked about how to use 301 redirects to convert error URLs obtained from the outside into accessible ones. URL, so as to achieve the transfer of weighted articles.
Today I saw an article on A5 called "A brief discussion on the dangers of using 301 redirection to transfer 404 pages to your own external links", which refuted the views in my previous article. I think it's very good. The SEO industry should have this kind of questioning spirit and the ability to think independently. I read the article carefully and found that the author misunderstood my meaning. So I will write another article to clarify the point of view and introduce the role of 301 redirection. First, I clarify two ideas in the article "Using 301 Redirect to Convert 404 Errors into Website External Links":
The article talks about redirecting the 404 error URL back to the original URL through 301. This point needs to be explained. I did not mention any 301 to the home page or other pages in the article. The example in the article is about linking from an external website (B website) to its own website (A website). It may occur in the process. URL misspellings, wrong link additions, or even intentionally generating wrong URLs. Rather than a 404 error on website A itself.
The original text is always there, and friends who have questions can read it carefully. Let me refute this friend’s point of view below (the words in blue are the opinions of friends who have rebuttal opinions):
Refute the first paragraph
The original author attributed the 404 errors in the external link pointing to the outside of the website. This sentence is understandable. However, the occurrence of this 404 error is also determined by the own website program. Once it occurs, there is no way to escape it, such as There can also be many 404 pages with suffixes like this or that on the A5 page. Just add 1.html and 2.html directly at the end, and that’s it. But if someone deliberately uses external links to link like this Web pages, that is also to bring links to the website, that's all. At most, it will generate a 404 page and nothing else.
If a 404 error occurs on the website, it is not necessarily a problem with the website's internal program. If the spider crawls to its own website (take website A as an example) through a wrong URL on an external website (take website B as an example), it will also cause a 404 error, that is, the wrong URL leads to the wrong page. The spider does not care whether your linked URL exists inside or outside the website. As long as a "page does not exist" occurs during crawling along the URL, a 404 error will be recorded.
We can clearly see this in the "Operation Status" - "Crawling Errors" - "Not Found" column of Google Administrator Tools. 404 errors are divided by Google into two categories: "in the sitemap" (internal cause) and "domain linked to your website page" (external cause).
As the name suggests, the "domain linking to your website page" refers to the URL linking from website B to website A.
Second paragraph of rebuttal
The original author means how to grasp the weight of this aspect, and wants to directly return the weight of this external link instead of letting it go. Here, the author also has his own point of view. This kind of external link itself "http:/ /www.xxxxx.com/rich-snippets.htmlGFQ", this kind of external link links to 404 pages. If you 301 these pages, this situation will be the same as a large number of 404 pages in the website, and then directly The situation of 404 pages and 301 to a page is the same; so if your website has 404 pages, in order to prevent the loss of these weights, should all these pages be 301 to the homepage? This is completely inconsistent with the requirements of search engines. If you want to If you know it clearly, just search "The dangers of 404 page 301 to the homepage" on Baidu and you will know more.
First of all, search engines obviously have a clear distinction between "own behavior" and "external behavior". Take link building as an example. Internal links and external links have different effects in terms of weight. Everyone knows this. The core idea is that external links are beyond the control of the webmaster, while internal links can be set by the webmaster. Although in the development process of search engines, the factor of "external links that can be controlled by the webmaster" appeared (that is, ordinary external link construction). But regardless of whether it is controllable or uncontrollable, one idea is clear, that is, no one will send the wrong URL on the premise that other people's websites can publish the correct URL, causing users to be unable to access their own website normally or to be unable to access their own website. The words "This page does not exist" appear on the website.
Secondly, whether 301 goes to the original web page or 301 goes to the home page. I don’t want to say more about this, everyone can understand what I mean by reading the original text. What I want to say here are some signals of how search engines identify the source of the original text:
Where search engines first see content
Trustworthiness of domain names with many similar content
Where there are the most links (internal links in the original text)
Whether the copy links back to the original source (copyright link)
Due to the existence of the second signal, many of the contents published or reprinted on other websites by our original authors cannot obtain good rankings. Many authors have complained about this, too. But we can use the 1, 3, and 4 point signals to correct this error.
Baidu is not very good at this, but Google can quickly and accurately identify the source of the original text. This is due to the above 3 points. The factor of "whether the copy links back to the original source" is also one of the purposes explained in my article "Using 301 Redirect to Convert 404 Errors into Website External Links". There is another purpose that you have also seen. Just transfer the weight.
Finally, redirect an incorrect URL that the user cannot access to the correct URL through 301 in a reasonable manner. It also helps with user experience. We also see this sentence in the "Crawling Errors" of Google Admin Tools.
Googlebot can't crawl the URL because it points to a page that doesn't exist. Typically, a 404 won't affect your site's ranking in search results, but you can use it to improve the user experience.
The only way to solve 404 errors is to block robots.txt or use 301 redirects. I don't think blocking will improve the user experience. The robots.txt approach can only improve the spider experience. Because after the user clicks on the wrong URL, they still access a page that does not exist and see a 404 error.
Refute the third paragraph
Directly copy the original words "If a code other than 404 or 410 is returned for a non-existent web page (or the user is redirected to other web pages such as the homepage instead of returning 404), problems may occur. First of all, this is equivalent to telling the search engine As a result, search engines may crawl this URL and index its content because Googlebot spends a lot of time processing non-existent pages and may not be able to find your URL quickly or frequently. By visiting these URLs, you won't be able to visit them frequently enough to impact crawling of your site's content (plus, you don't want your site to appear frequently in search queries for "File Not Found"). The original words of the 404 page, if you do not continue to jump to the error page as required, what may happen is that there will be a large number of the same pages on your website, the same title, the same description, the same content, etc., and then this is different The story between the URL and the same content. As for what will happen in the future? You can go to Baidu or search on Google to find out.
Since the rebuttal friend mentioned the Google Administrator Guidelines, don’t forget to excerpt another paragraph:
Generally speaking, 404 errors won't affect your site's ranking in Google, so you can safely ignore them. These errors are often the result of misspellings, misconfiguration (such as links automatically generated by content management systems), or Google's increased efforts to identify and crawl links in embedded content such as javascript.
To see the source of a dead link, click on the URL in question. In the error dialog box, click the Link from the following page tab. If relevant links come from your site, fix or remove them. If these links come from external websites, you can use this data to improve the user experience of your website. For example, if someone meant to link to your site but mistyped it, a legitimate URL would be misspelled (such as www.example.com/awesome instead of www.example.com/awsome ). Instead of returning a 404 error, you can 301 redirect a misspelled URL to the correct URL and get the expected traffic through that link. You can also make sure you help users find what they're looking for after you direct them to a 404 page, rather than just showing "404 Not Found." However, we only recommend taking these steps if the incorrect link is generating a high amount of traffic.
Source link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=zh-Hans&answer=2409439
Unfortunately, this friend only saw one, but not the other. When we are doing SEO, official information is very important. Many details are hidden in it, and it takes a lot of time to read and understand it carefully.
In fact, many of the settings and descriptions in Google Admin Tools make sense. It’s just that some of us SEOs don’t want to understand. Just like the internal and external causes of 404, it makes sense to distinguish them in the "crawl error" item. Instead of just doing it when you have nothing to do.
Summary: As SEOs, we need to absorb a lot of knowledge, and at the same time develop our own ideas and ways to analyze problems. But you need to make sure that the knowledge you learn is advanced and not outdated. Otherwise, your ideas can easily be misled, resulting in bad results.
Debating opinions is also a very important part of SEO work. No one can say with certainty that their understanding is correct. We can only use some official information disclosed and our own conclusions drawn through data analysis to prove the correctness of our ideas and theories.
This article was originally published by Yang Fan on Yang’s SEO. Please keep the link for reprinting: http://www.seoyangs.com/404-301-original-page.html
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