17 thoughts on ““Should I redirect all 404s to the homepage?” – SEO Office Hours #googlesearch”

  1. This makes total sense. For my clients I prioritize REMOVING or UPDATING the internal links themselves rather than just adding redirects. It obviously takes more time, but that simplifies the issue of deciding whether to 404 or 301 in the first place! (This obviously doesn't solve broken backlink problems though haha.)

  2. Makes sense to not redirect to the homepage, but why not to something we think is closet? because in that case what happens to the backlink pointing to that URL? we simply all the efforts we put in to acquire those links?

  3. This is one of the reasons why I love the 410 status code. It is highly under utilized and whenever I use i,t the page drops quickly from the index too.

    I am loving these videos btw. Keep making more 🙂

  4. Good approach of this video, simply direct to the point. Just a quick question, I think I did not find it in the documentation, just how should I hide a page? Is it only 404 / 401 / 403 / 500? If it is in the documentation, perhaps comment with the link. Great thanks.

  5. I have some products links of 404 and that I redirect to the home page or shop page, so is that affecting my site ranking? If yes, I remove that in GSC or is there any other way?. Plz answer.

  6. Create a custom 404 that informs the customer that the page/product/service is can no longer be found and recommend alterantives. Remove all internal links to the page and remove it from the sitemap. If it has external links – redirect it to another similar page after some time.

  7. I sell 10-inch stainless steel frying pans. We eliminated a product line and started a new one, so the old 10-inch pan is no longer available. Should I 404 that page instead of 301 it to the new 10-inch frying pan product page? This seems counterintuitive.

  8. If that's the case then in GSC don't make it look like it's an error and it's going to penalize the site owner. As an SEO Specialist I need to explain to my clients why they have 100 404 pages and why it's fine to have it.

    I agree it going to home page is not ideal but not every 404 page is going to have a solution. Product doesn't exist that's it.

  9. So the next question is, doesn’t Google penalize you for having 404s? If I have a big website, I’m not going to create new content for every single 404 so wouldn’t homepage redirect be the best move there?

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