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What to do with 8.6 million 404 pages
Hello everyone,
Last week, I joined an e-commerce company. Despite being established a few years ago, the company had not implemented any SEO strategies. The Google Search Console (GSC) had not been set up until I did it last week.
The results from the GSC crawl are in, and it turns out there are 8.6 million 404 pages (yes, million). These errors occurred because items that sold out were automatically deleted by Shopify (yes, they're using Shopify and no, there's no plan to migrate for now).
This is a new challenge for me, as it’s my first time working with an e-commerce company and first time doing Shopify SEO. So, I’m seeking advice on how to address these 8.6 million 404 pages. How can they be fixed? Or, should I just leave it be?
Has anyone else encountered similar issues? Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
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1 Reply
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Use GA to find the 404 URLs that are getting traffic and implement redirects ASAP.
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AI!
First time I have said that word when a person needed it on here.Use an app to automatically redirect to a product that looks like it. This will also fix problems in the future -because with 8,6mio 404 pages this not a ‘now problem’, it’s a problem that grows and grows 😀
There must be a Shopify app for this? Maybe: Redirect Pro or SEOAnt?
But this has to be done with AI, you can’t do it with if, then, else – because then it’s just redirect to categories all the time.I used [https://getredirects.com](https://getredirects.com) to do this for a site with 10k sites. worked very well.
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The “what” deserves some kind of analysis by you; but about the “how” if the web server is Apache you can apply redirect rules to groups of urls really fast in the .htaccess file
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To address the 8.6 million 404 pages on your Shopify store, follow these steps:
1. **Implement 301 Redirects**: Redirect the 404 pages to relevant category pages, similar products, or the homepage. Use Shopify’s URL Redirects feature or an app like “Easy Redirects.”
2. **Customize 404 Page**: Create a user-friendly 404 page that guides visitors to continue browsing, with links to popular products and categories.
3. **Update Internal Links**: Ensure all internal links point to active pages to avoid future 404 errors.
4. **Monitor and Clean Up**: Regularly check for new 404 errors and set up redirects promptly.
5. **Inform Customers**: If possible, notify customers about sold-out items and suggest alternatives.By addressing these 404 errors, you can improve user experience and SEO performance.
Good luck!
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Whoa, 8.6 million is a lot! First, don’t panic. Here’s what you can do:
1. **Redirects**: Use 301 redirects to send users from the 404 pages to relevant pages. Maybe to similar products, categories, or your homepage. Shopify has apps for managing redirects.
2. **Custom 404 Page**: Create a helpful 404 page with links to key areas of your site and a search bar. This will improve user experience.
3. **Update Sitemap**: Make sure your sitemap doesn’t include broken links. You can regenerate it in Shopify.
4. **Noindex Tag**: Add “noindex” to these 404 pages to keep them from being indexed by Google.
5. **Check Links**: Use tools to find and fix broken internal links pointing to these 404 pages.Don’t leave it be, it’s worth fixing! Good luck!
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You’ll be there forever trying to sort those. I’d find (as someone else mentioned) pages getting traffic and redirect those to next best page. If next best page not easy to find redirect to their category. Not perfect but still better than what is. Then find any of these pages with half decent links and redirect those too. Forget the rest and spend time on getting what is there now improved.
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Got 8.6 million 404 errors? Time for some cleanup! Use plugins like Broken Link Checker or Yoast SEO to identify and fix broken links. Then, install Redirection or 404 to 301 to manage redirects and ensure visitors land on the right pages. For a better user experience, create a custom 404 page with Custom 404 Pro, featuring helpful links and a search bar. Turn frustration into engagement and enhance your site’s functionality!
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It’s time to nuke it
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Use Shopify’s built-in tools to manage redirects and fix broken links. Utilize the ‘URL Redirects’ feature to set up redirects for broken URLs, and regularly audit your site using Shopify’s analytics to identify and address 404 errors. Additionally, create a custom 404 page using Shopify’s theme editor to provide a seamless user experience. With these steps, you can optimize your Shopify store and minimize 404 errors.
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Before you do anything you need to confirm if these 404s still actually exist on the website.
Google search console will continue to report 404s for a loooong time even after they are fixed and especially if they are in a long chain of 404s i.e. if you go into the inspector for one of these 404s and look at the referring page, is that referring page also a 404? Does it even exist? It probably doesn’t. GSC just hasn’t realised yet. If the referring page **does** exist and if you can phyiscally see the link on that referring page live on your site, then it needs fixing.
I suspect that the vast majority of the 404s you are seeing in GSC no longer exist therefore are not hurting the site. GSC has a long memory and in many cases the information it gives is just that, information. It’s up to the webmaster to judge if it needs addressing.
Download a crawler like screaming frog. You’ll need the paid version to crawl a large site. It’s a great tool for lots of things so worth the cost. I’ve never used it on a site with millions of pages though so it might take a while to fully crawl the site. Any 404s found in the crawl are the ones you need to address. Simply remove the link that causes the 404, or redirect it. Removing the link altogether is probably the best option if there is no other appropriate page to redirect to.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be too worried unless you see millions of 404s reported by your crawler. If that’s the case then you have a bunch of broken links on your live site and that certainly can affect your SEO, but 404s reported in GSC on their own are not a big deal. It’s not a ranking factor. They can serve a legitimate purpose and if there is no referring page, Google will eventually remove them. ***Eventually.*** It only becomes a problem when you have 404s (broken links) on your live site.
Note: with such a large number of 404s being reported, fixing them won’t remove them from Search Console for a long time and from experience, they will still be picked up even when you try to validate that they are fixed. They will linger there for a while. It’s just something you’ll have to accept. If you perform some tech wizardry to automatically redirect all of these 404s, all you are doing is moving them over to the “Page with redirect” section of the report.
The main thing is getting broken links ***on your live site*** fixed and addressing the cause of these broken links so they don’t keep popping up.
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I’m curious to take a look if you want to DM me a URL – I have nothing more to sell to you than Search Console, and it looks like you already have that 🙂
In general, 404’s are fine. Millions of them can be fine. This can be totally normal. Looking at user-traffic will tell you more, like /u/Yakka43336 mentioned.
Shopify doesn’t run Apache (well, that you can access), and you can’t install WP plugins there.
The main thing I would look for in the 404 pages sample from Search Console is whether you’re systemically doing something funky with regards to URLs. Are you using new URLs every time a product comes back into stock? Are you changing URLs for existing products without redirecting? Are you submitting the correct URLs via Merchant Center? In short, are you actively creating this problem, or is it just the usual churn in ecommerce? Normal churn is fine, you don’t gain anything by hiding it.
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Dropshipping shopify sites have these issues mostly.
1. Use screamingfrog to identify actual 404s
2. Since it’s shopify, you are limited in plugins/apps
3. Millions (if they exist) of 404s are impossible to handle manually
4. Check shopify settings to ensure products are only deleted manually (will save pain in future)
5. Check the actual 404s index and ranking status
6. The ones that are ranking, redirect to products listed (will be few, if there)
7. The ones that show 404 on screamingfrog but are either not indexed or rank, redirect to 410 using a shopify app
8. Resubmit to GSCGoogle takes a long time to remove 410 / 404, be patient and keep an eye on screamingfrog probably fortnightly
Best of luck!
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Shopify is a nightmare for SEO. It’s simply not set up for that and it makes it challenging to do it well there.
Someone else suggested confirming the 404 pages are still active on the website. You could be finding pages that were technically deleted by cached by Google. I am also a huge fan of Screaming Frog and second that recommendation.
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What i do is run a backlink report on your website, export these to a crawler, detect which backlinked pages return a 404 and do a 301 redirect on these pages to a relevant page on your website. Ignore the rest
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something doesn’t make sense. if GSC wasn’t done until now how was the site on Google before you just had it crawled? how would Google see pages that no longer exist if it was just crawled for the first time?
if these pages are showing up in ‘Why pages aren’t indexed’ as Not found (404) then they do not show up in Google Search and if they aren’t pages currently on the website then they don’t exist and nothing to do. they are supposed to be in ‘Why pages aren’t indexed’ since Google realized they do not exist and removed them from search results appropriately.
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