We have very basic SEO needs and use The SEO Framework Version 4.2.8 on our site. We have several “Not found (404)” errors in Google Search Console — some are archived pages and some pages have never existed.
Based on what I’ve read, it seems like the best way to fix these errors is to either delete the archived page or create a 301 redirect. I see where to create a 301 redirect using The SEO Framework’s “Visibility” tab on individual live and archived pages. But I don’t see how to create a 301 redirect using The SEO Framework for pages that have never existed (there’s no individual page to go to).
Is there a way to add a redirect for a URL that doesn’t exist? Thank you.
A 404 response is expected and reasonable if a page never existed and no further action needs to be taken. However, if you have a lot of traffic and backlinks going to those lost pages, I recommend recreating them and filling them in or redirecting them to a page about the same topic.
If you can’t find a good reason to recreate the page, or can’t find a good page to redirect to (the homepage is often not the right page), then let those 404 pages exist. Web users understand: A 404 not found page is a natural part of the web.
You could add helpful links or a search bar to the 404 page… or make a meme out of it like we did. Either way, the user won’t land on a page they never explicitly requested.
TSF requires a post or term to set up a redirect because the post-meta is lazy-loaded whenever a post is requested. If the post has no redirect, it shall simply skip the single sane and simple status check. This allows you to have millions of redirects without slowing down your site, for only one is tested per request.
On the other hand, if you set up redirects globally, every single request needs to be matched against all your configured redirects, and this can slow down your entire site once you have many.
If you only need to redirect a few pages, I recommend creating those pages and setting up a redirect for those. If you want to manage this more thoroughly and without creating pages, you should use Redirection: https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/. It works perfectly alongside TSF.
@cybr Thanks so much! Your reply was extremely helpful. In our case, I think the Redirection plugin was the best course of action. I implemented it and Search Console finally finished validating the changes. Thanks again.
Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
The topic ‘Add Redirect for URLs That Don’t Exist’ is closed to new replies.
