Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Designing a website without 404s

pillser.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 109 posts

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#52

Post by Dalewyn »

lm411 wrote: post #46

I understand why the author thinks this is a good idea, but 404 exists for a reason. Literally "Not Found", not "I will guess at what you are looking for". The "implications for SEO" will almost certainly not be "positive" for quite a few reasons. As a general rule in my experience and learning, Google's black box algorithm doesn't like anything like this, and I expect you will be penalized for it. There are many goo…

I hate websites that redirect URLs that should be 404s to something else like their homepage or whatever they think is relevant. My brain has to slam on the brakes and make sense of the absolute dissonance between what I expected and what I'm seeing, which is taxing.

A 404 doesn't cause nearly as much dissonance, because the website is at least telling me why what I'm seeing is not what I expected.

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#53

Post by hinkley »

lm411 wrote: post #46

I understand why the author thinks this is a good idea, but 404 exists for a reason. Literally "Not Found", not "I will guess at what you are looking for". The "implications for SEO" will almost certainly not be "positive" for quite a few reasons. As a general rule in my experience and learning, Google's black box algorithm doesn't like anything like this, and I expect you will be penalized for it. There are many goo…

The last SaaS application I worked on was having issues similar to what you are saying. Too many distinct urls were arriving at the same page content and Google thinks this is you trying to do something naughty unless they all contain metadata for the same canonical URL, which we weren't handling right.

Not only did it improve our page rank once we fixed it, it also reduced the amount of bot traffic we were fielding.

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#54

Post by tobyhinloopen »

mvkel wrote: post #50
lm411 wrote: post #46

I understand why the author thinks this is a good idea, but 404 exists for a reason. Literally "Not Found", not "I will guess at what you are looking for". The "implications for SEO" will almost certainly not be "positive" for quite a few reasons. As a general rule in my experience and learning, Google's black box algorithm doesn't like anything like this, and I expect you will be penalized for it. There are many goo…

This is absolutely right. The duplicate content flags alone will cancel everything out. I don't understand why people don't just read Google's own published guidelines ( https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-s... ) on how to properly SEO one's site. It's not some dark art. Google themselves tell you exactly how they index and why. All you have to do is read the guidelines.

If the pages redirect and have a canonical irl, there should be no problem, right?

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#55

Post by otherme123 »

mvkel wrote: post #50
lm411 wrote: post #46

I understand why the author thinks this is a good idea, but 404 exists for a reason. Literally "Not Found", not "I will guess at what you are looking for". The "implications for SEO" will almost certainly not be "positive" for quite a few reasons. As a general rule in my experience and learning, Google's black box algorithm doesn't like anything like this, and I expect you will be penalized for it. There are many goo…

This is absolutely right. The duplicate content flags alone will cancel everything out. I don't understand why people don't just read Google's own published guidelines ( https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-s... ) on how to properly SEO one's site. It's not some dark art. Google themselves tell you exactly how they index and why. All you have to do is read the guidelines.

In that document they explain that duplicate content is not a big deal: just set a canonical, and respond maybe with a 301.

I did this during a migration of a site that used '//' and was changed to '//' with corresponding 301. The SEO not only didn't punish the migration, but it seemed to like the change (except the Bingbot, that after five years still request the old Urls).

The problem I see with the OP strategy is that the bot can hit a Url that still doesn't exist, get 301'ed with that technique, and the Url is reused afterwards for new content: following their example, somebody links to '/supplements/otherbrand-spore-probiotic', that gets a bot following that link 301'ed to '/supplements/spore-probiotic'. Later you actually add 'otherbrand-spore-probiotic', but that Url will never be visited by the bot.

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#56

Post by default-kramer »

mvkel wrote: post #50
lm411 wrote: post #46

I understand why the author thinks this is a good idea, but 404 exists for a reason. Literally "Not Found", not "I will guess at what you are looking for". The "implications for SEO" will almost certainly not be "positive" for quite a few reasons. As a general rule in my experience and learning, Google's black box algorithm doesn't like anything like this, and I expect you will be penalized for it. There are many goo…

This is absolutely right. The duplicate content flags alone will cancel everything out. I don't understand why people don't just read Google's own published guidelines ( https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-s... ) on how to properly SEO one's site. It's not some dark art. Google themselves tell you exactly how they index and why. All you have to do is read the guidelines.

I mostly agree, but also... it kinda is a dark art? I just read the "Reduce duplicate content" section [1] because my gut reaction was "yeah, I agree, this guy is going to get SEO-penalized for this" but of course I don't actually know. And although my few years of experience dealing with this stuff still want to say "you will get SEO-penalized for this", Google's own guidelines do not: "If you're feeling adventurous, it's worth figuring out if you can specify a canonical version for your pages. But if you don't canonicalize your URLs yourself, Google will try to automatically do it for you. [...] again, don't worry too much about this; search engines can generally figure this out for you on their own most of the time. "

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-s...

Re: Designing a website without 404s

#58

Post by bestest »

I only redirect urls with ids. E.g. the canonical is "/:id-some-slug", so if the url matches the id but not the slug — I redirect it to the canonical.

For everything else you can just have a nice 404 with suggestions of links that probably are a match.

Post reply on HN