There are useful free blogging tools available on the internet that can be used to maintain the links in your WordPress.com blog and keep close track of them. The last thing you want to do is create “404″ ”Page not found” error pages. It’s a supreme disappointment to visitors, who may not choose to use the searchbox and explore your content to locate what they are looking for.
By definition a 404 “Page not found” is an HTTP status code. It occurs when your computer makes request for a specific webpage to the server and the server cannot locate that page. This error can be due to deleting a post or page from the site. It can be created by changing datestamps on posts. It can also be a result of a malformed URL, or by making a typing error resulting in an incorrect URL.
There are many ways that bloggers end up creating 404 pages including these:
- Publish a post or page and then delete it
- Publish a post and then change the date
- Publish a post or page and then change the URL slug (end part of URL)
- Delete images from your Media Library that have been published in pages or posts
- Move a post from one category to another
- Delete a category from a published post
- Delete a tag from a published post
- Delete a category from your site
- Delete a tag from your site
- Convert all your categories to tags
- Convert all your tags to categories
Publish a post and then change the date
Google wants to deliver fresh, relevant content, so in 2010 when Google Instant Search was introduced they made datestamps within blog posts a criteria by which they determine freshness of content. Permalink structure can be changed on WordPress.org self hosted installs and many bloggers with “News” blogs removed datestamps from their posts.
Ranking in Google News is determined based on a number of factors, including:
- Freshness of content
- Diversity of content
- Rich textual content which would help users searching for information to find your articles
The WordPress.org news bloggers were not alone when it came to removing datestamps, other WordPress.org bloggers in different niches followed suit. What carried over into the WordPress.com blogging community was (1) the perceived need to eliminate datestamps from posts and (2) a desire to change datestamps on older posts.
The permalink structure, which cannot be changed on WordPress.com blogs, includes a datestamp embedded in post URLs. While you can edit the posts and change the datestamps in the Publish module in WordPress.com blogs, I caution you to think long and hard before you do for three reasons.
1. Changing datetamps on posts that have been indexed by search engines means when anyone uses a search engine, gets back search results containing links to pages that no longer exist, and clicks those links they will get 404 “Page not found” error.
2. Changing datestamps also means that all the posts you change datestamps on must be re-indexed by search engines. As search engines do not clear their caches frequently. The result oc changing datestamps after re-indexing will be that the original links which will produce 404 “Page not found” error messages, and the new links will both appear in the SERPs (search engine page results) at the same time.
3. Changing datestamps on blog posts gives rise to the question: Who do you blog for? When researching it can be important to know the date a post was published on. Indeed some readers like myself may be annoyed when they cannot determine when it was published.
Note 1: If you delete the placeholder “Hello World” post on a WordPress.com blog then the front page of your blog will produce a 404 “Page not found error message. In this case all you have to do is publish a post and the error message will disappear.
Note 2: For the specific 404 “Page not found” error messages as they appear on free hosted WordPress.com blog themes see The 404 error message.
Note 3: “Don’t use the [Google] URL removal tool to get rid of pages [... ] to clean up cruft, like old pages that 404. The tool is intended for URLs that urgently need to be removed, such as confidential data that was accidentally exposed. If you recently made changes to your site and now have some outdated URLs in the index, Google’s crawlers will see this as we recrawl your URLs, and those pages will naturally drop out of our search results over time.”
Fascinating post ! I knew nothing about any of this at all. I have received the odd email 404 when someone has clicked publish and then changed their mind and deleted the post but never thought about the search engines ramifications. That is really interesting.
I agree that when researching it is really important to know when something was written. I wonder idly what happens to people who migrate their blogs to WordPress from another platform, do the original dates come with their posts? I am not planning on doing that, but I know from transferring old files from old wordprocessing progammes to new ones that the dates of the new files are always the date you save the new version. I leave the datestamp alone and having read this I will hesitate before I ever consider playing around with it. Thank you TT!
Hi there,
I’m glad this article provided you with information that was news to you ie. leave the datestamps alone! I think we can become “insular” and forget that we are publishers and what the role of search engines play is. When people move content to WordPress.org unless they have purchased a domain mapping or site redirect upgrade all the original links will not redirect to the new domain links. My next article will be on that.
You’re welcome.
Great article. I once un-published something that I had published in error (I had meant to click to save the draft) – and I saw that Google had indexed the post almost immediately – so that I once I un-published, I had an error page showing.
Changing the datestamps on already published pages in order to force the spiders to read their content again and see it as new – what a lot of effort that could be put into actually writing some content…
When I first began to blog I was unaware of the impact that deleting a post or a category or a tag had. Since on a few occasions I have accidentally clicked “publish” rather than “save draft” and had the same experience you did. As for the observation you make in your last paragraph I agree with you. Time and energy are better spent of creating new content than the playing counter productive change the date stamp game.
Thanks for the info. I also have done the same thing; click publish instead of save draft. Good tips on the date stamps.
I’m not surprised to hear you have also made that mistake. Eventually we all do and then we look for rocks to crawl under before reminding ourself “it’s only a blog”. Once we do that we can LOL :D and edit.
Kind of funny, but your column on Aug 10 RE: Header lead me to a “Page not found” screen! smile!
Hi Julie,
I haven’t published an August 10th post so I’m not clear on which link you clicked that produced a 404. Please post again and provide the link you clicked.
Very Helpful Tips
You’re welcome.
Great post, TT, and I wish I’d read it earlier…
I’m glad you did read it and are proceeding in private mode now.
I’ve actually got quite a lot of problems with the blog re search engines at the moment (trying to decide what to do) but I won’t bore you with all that. I’ll sort it out in due course. I might actually decide not to open it to search engines after all, it seems a lot of hassle.
Meh … I have crawl errors and broken image links in my personal blog I moved back here from self hosting last spring and still no time to fix them. I do a little whenever I can and I avoid creating new “problems” to fix. It’s open to search engines and I don’t fret about it. I have so much else to do I don’t have time to fret.
SHRUG … meh
Pingback: Revisting Keywords and Tags | one cool site
Hopefully quick question, TT. I hadn’t seen this post before.
If we can’t change categories or remove tags, does that mean we just have to be very, very careful about tags and categories before publishing, because we can’t really change them later without problems? Or am I misunderstanding? I thought if I saw something that would fit better in a different category, I could just zap it over to the other category, but it sounds like that’s a problem.
Every time you delete a catgory/tag from any post that has already been indexed by search engines you are creating a “404 (page not found)”. I don’t do this for theat reason.The useful purpose Tags/Categories serve is to direct readers to content found deeper than the front page (or main page for posts) on your blog.
Tags/Categories are not required for SEO purposes. These days search engines pay more attention to your keywords in your content than they do to your keywords in Tags/Categories. http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2012/03/01/revisting-keywords-and-tags/
Thank you for the answer and the link. Very helpful.
So the problem only arises if someone searches on the old category? And it will go away once the search engine reindexes? Seems like if it was the wrong category, the change might be worthwhile because you will only annoy someone if they were searching for a category that didn’t apply. Is a 404 worse than someone hitting a post because I’ve mis-categorized it, and reading the whole thing and wasting their time?
I love your new background…
Google clears their caches about every 3 – 6 months. Bing appears to be clearing theirs every 6 months. Yahoo never clears their indexed content caches at all as far as I can tell.
Thank you.
yep, I learnt that after I had done useless categories. So now I have quite a few 404 for deleted tags but in 6 months it will be ok. I’m patient and I build the most for content not only for strategies. I now have only 30 tags and I think I will stick with that. I consider them as subcategories. But as I read that it shouldn’t be appropriate to have both categories and tags cloud on the sidebar, I might think to not use tags at all anymore (but I don’t double categories and tags – they are all independents).
Thanks for your great blog, btw
Hi David,
If I were to start a blog from scratch knowing what I know now there wouldn’t many categories and tags used. However, I’ve already gone over the top in this blog and I won’t be deleting and creating 404′s. Thanks and best wishes with your blog.
Thank you :) And I’ll try to do the same from now on ;)