This Is How You Should Handle Invalid URLs On Your Website
- 20 March, 2019
- Jason Ferry
- Invalid URLs
In the SEO community today, it’s not that hard to notice those who are worried about 5XX errors and invalid URLs in their websites. In fact, on Twitter, someone asked Google’s John Mueller regarding the capability of Google Search Console to discover 5XX errors. This led to Mueller sharing some guidance in handling invalid URLs on a website.
According to him, invalid URLs must return 404 errors to make Google aware that the URLs don’t belong to a certain website anymore. However, a 5XX error doesn’t send the same kind of signal. Now, this is something that both SEO experts and webmaster should take note of.
Muller didn’t acknowledge the great ability of Google Search Console to detect a 5XX error. But instead, he advised site owners to avoid having URLs that can result in 5XX server errors, no matter where they came from.
A follow-up question was asked to Muller about the window of time when Google will stop crawling a 404 page. To answer this, he said that they won’t stop crawling a 404 page as long as signals for the URL are existing. And these include even just a random link somewhere.
Details used in this post were gathered from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-invalid-urls-should-return-404s-not-5xx-server-errors/298729/. Click the link for more details.
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