Hello firstly thank you for your excellent support you have given me by email. this is very much appreciated.

We identified that there are 2k soft 404 and 1k hard 404 identified by google. As you said the best way to deal with this is to follow best code of practice which would be to delete each one one by one or fix the broken link and internal links pointing to the broken link or somehow exclude from site map. However as there are so many of these circa 3k it would take me about a week or two of work. This is too much so is there a shortcut? For example can I take all the broken url's picked up by ReDj and copy and paste them into the robots text to stop spiders from crawling them?
This could be done manually or through a third party site map generator.

Secondly what would happen if I used your component to MASS 301 permanent redirect all the broken links? Is there way to do this and would this fix the problem for those 3k broken links or would Google punish me for this?

Many thanks
David

Hi,
about the second question, there is a ReDJ plugin option that allows you to redirect to a custom page (e.g. the site home) all error pages. In this way any called URL that should return an error is replaced with a redirect.

About the first question, you can try to prevent spiders indexing, but as I told you, the problem with Google soft errors is related to URLs internally linked (e.g. your sitemap) that you redirect elsewhere. So the best solution could be to remove reference from internal site. Try to remove there pages from the sitemap, as example.

Best regards,
Luigi

Thank you Luigi,



I do understand and have been using this for some time now but google categorises these redirects as soft404 redirects what would happen if all the redirect pages were given 301 permanently moved? Your component can't do this on the fly as it can with 404's but I am curious to know how Google would react to them being converted to 301's ?

Thank you for your time.

When this option is enabled, ReDJ intercepts the error before it is returned to the client, and replace it with a redirect 301.

So Google will never know that the original URL is an error page or what else. But this will not solve your soft error problems, if the first URL is still linked elsewhere.

Kind regards,
Luigi