Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Saurabh Rawat on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 10/24/2019).

Cleaning up ton of pages with the 404

We are noticing a ton of pages with the 404 that are not falling out of the index.In this case, we are going to use the HTTP header for directive signals, instead of the meta robots for clean up. Will it make the process fast?
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Scott Clark: Are these pages in site map?
  • Scott Clark: If you have a list of these pages, create a temporary sitemap and submit it to GSC. This can expedite Googlebot seeing the 404 and deindexing the site.
  • Richard Hearne: A 404 is a 404. Adding conflicting signals via robots meta or headers won`t help. More likely to disrupt. Better might be to provide links to these 404s to nudge recrawl, either via html or XML sitemap.
  • Saurabh Rawat: then why all wordpress sites have noindex robots meta in their 404 page.
  • Richard Hearne: I cant tell you about WordPress, but I can tell you that Google reps have repeatedly stated that they will not index 404 URLs. They may retain for some time URLs which previously resolved but later 404`d, but that`s not quite the same thing.
  • Michael Martinez: Search engines may index dead URLs if they find links pointing to them. If you`re not serving "soft 404" via a CMS it may be better to redirect the dead URLs to an empty page that specifies "noindex" in the meta data.
  • Saurabh Rawat: Thanks everyone, I have also asked about this to John. It`s true - there is no benefit by adding noindex on 404 page.
    https://twitter.com/SEOGuruJaipur/status/1186936224289714176
  • Michael Martinez: What John said is that "noindex" will be processed at the same speed as a 404. That doesn`t mean there is no benefit to adding a "noindex" to a 404 page. Google may still list a non-existent URL in search results if it finds links pointing to it. Redirecting to a "noindex" page should eliminate those listings, which annoy some people.
  • Saurabh Rawat: okkkee.. SEO is not simple as I thought.
    One more question: Why SEO people want to remove 404 pages from indexing. Is there any benefit?
  • Michael Martinez: I don`t know of any actual benefit. I guess it would be an aesthetic issue for most people. So many people ask the same question in different ways, sometimes it`s hard to determine what they want or need.
  • Saurabh Rawat: Michael Martinez thanks

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 10/24/2019).