As if technical issues with your website, such as 404 errors, aren’t frustrating enough! If you’re unfortunate enough to be one of these people, it gets even worse. High bounce rates will indicate to Google that your website doesn’t provide any useful information to users. When Google sees websites with errors, they are deemed as “unsafe”, or “lower quality” websites. As a result, your rankings in the search results will suffer.
Google’s focus is on enhancing user experience and they favour well-structured websites with no errors of any sort, giving those sites better rankings. Most of these errors can be found using Webmaster Tools. If you find any of these on your website, you should fix them as quickly as you can.
– 500 Internal Server Error
– 301 & 302 redirects
– Access denied errors
– 404 error – “Page not found”
– Duplicate META data
– Canonical errors
– Improper use of the noindex, nofollow directives
Make it common practice to regularly check your site to ensure it’s error-free. Googlebots are your friends, so stay on their good side and correct errors as soon as they arise.
For more useful information on 301 redirects and how they can affect your SEO, click here.