301 SEO Voodoo to avoid 404
Most SEO consultants will run their tool of choice to give their new client a list of 404 pages which according to them have to be changed into 301 to save all the link juice (backlinks). It’s a low hanging fruit for them: They have minimal work with it because they use automated tools to generate it. The result paints a gruel picture of lost opportunities if the client does not move all 404s to 301s immediately. To them any 404 is a SEO coffin nail. Your Google ranking is doomed!
Their argumentation is so plausible:
Every 404 loses incoming link juice (backlinks). Google will slap you hands. Obviously! Who in his right mind would use a 404 when a 301 would save all that beautiful link juice?!
For any non-technical and even for the many technical clients their argument is valid and makes sense. But let’s take a deeper look into this.
What is a 404 or 301?
Web server communicate with web browsers. One part of that communication is a status code. The most common one is 200 which says that the requested URL exists. If it doesn’t exist the web server answers with a 404 (Not Found Error Message) error message. So the web browser understands that this URL doesn’t exist. It can display an error message. But most times the web server will transfer an error HTML file itself. This can contain anything. It doesn’t even have to say “404” anywhere. It is for humans only!
Sometimes files move on the server. They get renamed. And because a URL is kind of a file name itself there is a way to tell a web browser that a URL has moved to a different URL. Maybe someone started a blog and used this format for a web page: /articles/2017–02–28-foobar.html. But after some time he/she decides to use a different URL: /2017/02/28/articles/foobar.html. This would be a perfect example to use a 301(Moved Permanently) which tells the web client that the URL has changed. So the web browser can use this information to fetch the content from the new URL. It’s like a forwarding request for your mail.
The SEO Anti 404 Argument
Let’s assume you sell apples and oranges in your online shop. A customer can get informations about apples and buy them at /products/apples. And a customer can get information about oranges and buy them at /products/oranges. One day you decide to not sell apples any more. Your SEO consultants says that countless webpages link to your /products/apples page. He can proof this to you with his fancy tools. He knows that Google calculates your search result position by that number of incoming links. So he wants you to not respond with a 404 but a 301 which redirects to /products/oranges. By that you can recycle the incoming apple link power for your oranges.
Great argumentation and logic! And thanks god nobody can argue against it. You can’t ask Google how they rate. Or can you? Actually you can and I did. I ask John Mueller who is Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google about exactly this problem:
He answered right away:
But a Antonio Sangio smelled deception and asked a follow up question:
See! Antonio rubbed salt into the wound. Google will penalize this website. For sure. Obviously! But wait! Here’s John answer:
Wait a minute! So a 404 is correct and a misleading 301 is not?! Who would have thought of this!
John Mueller of Google says that you should return a correct 404 for
/products/appleswithout the fear of being penalized! Google will not penalize correct behavior.
Did your SEO guy lie to you?
No, he probably didn’t lie. At least not by purpose. He just doesn’t understand his business. He follows the lead of all the other SEO consultants he knows. Like a lemming following his fellow lemmings.
SEO consultants love to use FUD (Fear, uncertainty and doubt). And the whole 301 vs. 404 argument is about your biggest fear: Losing Google search result ranking.
Let’s use our Brain
We know that Google counts the amount of incoming links to rank your webpage. So if e.g. 500 other webpages link you your /products/apples webpage it means that this page must be important. It must be an important resource for all things “apples”. By using a 301 to redirect them to /products/oranges you will water down the relevance of your orange page. Because people expect some sort of information about apples and not oranges. So by using a 301 you will not just not save any link juice but harm your existing ranking for oranges! Let that sink in for a moment.
By using a 404 you tell Google and any other search engine that this URL doesn’t exist any more. Google will still calculate the overall importance of your online shop high because of those 500 incoming links even when they result in a 404. But Google will send less “apple” requests to your page. Which makes sense since you stopped selling apples.
404 can still deliver a human readable web page!
So we established that you return a 404 for /products/apples because you stopped selling apples. But for those humans who click on that incoming link you can display a page which says “Sorry, we don’t sell apples any more but have a look at our great oranges! Just click on /products/oranges for a complete list.”
By that you don’t lose the human but you give Google the needed information.
What about 302?
In short: 301 means for ever and 302 means just for a while. But since we established the fact that you do not want to 301 any of your apple requests it doesn’t matter anyhow.
BTW: There is no “for ever” for a search engine. It will try less often but will never not try it at all.
Conclusion
It’s very easy: If you stop selling a product or offering a service of any sort than you want to deliver a 404 for that URL. Keep using 301 but only if a URL has changed. Not if it doesn’t exist any more.
And next time your SEO consultant aka Lemming brings up the “use 301 and not 404” fairy tale you’ll give him the URL of this article.
PS: Let me close with a link to my business homepage so that Google adds this to my ranking: Best SEO advise ever! SCNR. ;-)
