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Ravi8258870

: Dead URLs from old CMS showing up in SERP. Wordpress not serving 404 when old links are accessed = old URLs won't die Dead URLs from the previous CMS on this domain is displayed in SERP,

@Ravi8258870

Posted in: #DeadLinks #GoogleAnalytics #Serps #Wordpress

Dead URLs from the previous CMS on this domain is displayed in SERP, most likely due to people still trying to access them through bookmarks or browser history. This traffic is picked up by Google Analytics, and probably causing these dead URLs to be prioritized because they are popular/often accessed.

This is all perpetuated because Wordpress is not responding with 404/301 when these ghost URLs are accessed.

Is there a way to force Wordpress to respond with 404/301 when visitors are accessing non-existing pages?

Right now visitors get served an 'empty' page, displaying only header and footer – no real content.

EDIT: Reworked the text in light of new information to clarify the problem.

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@Lee4591628

There are two WordPress plugins I've used for managing 301 redirects: Redirection & Simple 301 Redirects.

Either plugin makes it easy to define redirects from Old -> New.



The WordPress Codex also has a guide to Creating an Error 404 Page. If that doesn't work, you may try contacting your web host to see if there's a configuration option you're missing.

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@Pope3001725

Try the Google URL Removal tool (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals), allows you to submit pages to be removed from search results if they have been altered (versus google cache) or removed.

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