Recently in Google Search Console I’ve started seeing lots of HTTP 404 errors related to /services/ category.
Last month, I’ve decommissioned that site and moved to another URL. Take a look at new site here: https://crunchify.com/wordpress-consulting/, it’s brand new Premium Service page.
As, https://crunchify.com/wordpress-consulting/ was a dedicated page, there were few categories and pages which are not accessible now. All of those blog pages might be cached in Google Sitemap or other Social Media and hence while crawling, those pages are resulting into 404 error page.
Usually, HTTP 404 errors doesn’t affect your page ranking in Google but it’s not a good behavior for users. Ideally, it’s good practice to visit Crawl error page once a month and fix all 404 errors which you could.
If you have any of below questions then you are at right place:
- Category Redirection for WordPress (301 Redirects)
- Redirecting one category to another using .htaccess
- How to Change Category Slug within WordPress
- How to 301 redirect old wordpress category?
- How to Properly Rename Categories in WordPress
How to fix HTTP 404 error?
I was wondering, what is the best way to fix these 404 errors?
There are two ways:
- Add redirection for each 404 page
- Add regex pattern to match
/services/in URL and direct all pages to/wordpress-consulting/page
I choose to go for 2nd option.
What do I have to do?
In order to achieve point 2 above, you need to add below line to your .htaccess file.
RewriteRule ^services/?(.*)$ https://crunchify.com/wordpress-consulting/ [R=301,L]
I waited a few days and all Google Search Console errors for /services/ URLs disappeared. I hope this helps you.
Happy blogging.