Thursday, August 3

Remove 404 error pages from google index

Remove 404 error pages from google index

HTTP 404, 404 Not Found Error means that the webpage you were trying to reach could not be found on the server. It is a Client side Error, Which means that either the page has been removed , moved to another URL, or the URL you typed in address bar is incorrectly. 404 pages error are used to inform about the broken or removed links.


If you ever removed a page or post from your site. You will find that google is still indexing this post or page , Which becoming the reason for the 404 error.


So question is can you remove these 404 pages from google index? 

The answer to this question is both yes and no. Because you cannot remove these pages directly from the Google indexing but you can use robot.txt to tell search engine crawlers to stop indexing your 404 pages using disallow function. Disallow function tells search engine bots to not crawl a specific page or post from your site/blog.

How to remove 404 error pages from google search index ?

Step1: Go to your site/blog robot.txt file.  For , Blogger go to Blogger > setting > Search Preferences and enable Custom robot.txt. If you are using WordPress then open your site's root folder and create a new file with name robot.txt

Step2: Copy and paste below codes to robot.txt file.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /p/about-us.html
Disallow: /p/cn.html
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://www.livthreads.com/sitemap.xml

Step3: Change red bold text with the URL of pages you want to remove from google search index and save changes.

After disallowing URL , Search engine crawlers will take some days to completely stop indexing your pages.