Google Webmaster monitoring is one of most important thing a digital marketer or a brand should monitor while focusing on Search Engine Optimization. While doing SEO, more than 75% of website focus on Google Parameters.
One should always focus on google webmaster errors and in this post, we are going to look on one of most encountered webmaster error, 404 errors.
404 Error in Google Webmaster
404 error in webmaster triggers up if
- A Google Indexed page is deleted
- A Web page is not available when Google crawls the whole website
- Your server goes down in the process of crawling
- A 3rd persons/hacker adds up malicious sitemap
There are 3 ways you can solve google webmaster errors
#1 Temporarily Hide the post or page
This method is an effective method to remove the pages from SERP(Google Search Engine Result Pages). However, This method can hide your webpage only for 90 days. The page will appear once again back on SERP(Search Engine Result Page).
To remove your page temporarily you submit the page URL to this webpage.
#2 Deindex the page/post permanently on Google
The best way to go ahead and remove the page from Google permanently is to put noindex tag on your page/post and put a removal request.
Permanently Removal of WordPress page/post from Google
If you are on WordPress and have Yoast SEO plugin installed then you can simply put a noindex tag by following these steps.
- Go to edit panel of page/post you want to remove from google
- Go to the bottom of editor panel and click on Yoast expansion icon
- Then click on setting icon Go to Meta Robots index and select “noindex” from dropdown.
- Once selected update your post
- Put a removal request on google webmaster page
Permanent removal of webpage from Google
If you have a site website which has static HTML pages and you have a little knowledge of coding then you should follow the steps. If you aren’t aware then you can get this done by a developer.
- Login to the backend of your website and open the root directory
- Open the webpage you want to remove from HTML editor
- Find the head closing tag by searching “</head>” in search bar
- and paste the code given below.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">
once you are done with process put a removal request on Google. This will let your webpage disappear faster than natural removal time.
Note: You can only put removal request to Google only if your website is verified by Google webmaster.
#3 Remove outdated content
Method 3 will be updated soon!
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6349986?hl=en
Pros: Users get the latest content
Cons: Your old pages no more gets traffic from old pages
Pros: Google recommends this way to remov ethe page
What if you want the page live on your site but removed from google search result page.
It’s simple, you can just add the option noindex from Yoast SEO Plugin from the bottom of the edit post panel.
