Updating sitelinks in Google search for 404 pages

[ash-grin]

I am working on a website that has had a 404 page show up in the sitelinks for weeks (maybe even longer). We already submitted a new sitemap. Is there anything else that can be done? I know you can't manually choose the sitelinks but maybe someone has some others ideas on how to get Google to stop pulling in the 404 page.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

If you have redirected that 404 page to a good page, I would submit that good page directly in Search Console. If you still have internal links pointing to the bad page (which then gets redirected), I would ask for Google to crawl that page in the hopes that the crawler will follow the links off the page so it updates itself.

I don't know how often Google updates the site links though, so it's possible that it's already fixed, but Google hasn't updated itself yet.

 

[ash-grin]

If you have redirected that 404 page to a good page, I would submit that good page directly in Search Console. If you still have internal links pointing to the bad page (which then gets redirected), I would ask for Google to crawl that page in the hopes that the crawler will follow the links off the page so it updates itself.

I don't know how often Google updates the site links though, so it's possible that it's already fixed, but Google hasn't updated itself yet.

Thanks Yan. The page was removed, so it is 404ing, there is no new page to redirect it to. The content is just completely removed. There are also no internal links pointing to it. From what I understand it is a waiting game, but was hoping someone had out of the box ideas to ping Google this page is gone and to stop showing it as a sitelink.

 

[djbaxter]

Add a redirect 410 to your .htaccess file.

Redirect 410 https://yourdomain.com/page-portion-of-removed-page-url

 

[Conor Treacy]

Google used to have a tool where you could remove the Sitelink (or demote it) but it looks like they killed off the feature a few years ago

Adding the 410 redirect should take care of the issue though as according to their support docs, they should only be showing pages that are useful to searchers - so if it's showing a 410 response (gone), they should remove it from the list.

 

[ash-grin]

Thanks @djbaxter and @Conor Treacy . Unfortunately WPengine doesn't allow for 410, so we are not able to implement that. I guess there are no other options, but thanks anyway!

 

[djbaxter]

This free plugin may help (I haven't needed to use it yet):

Redirection

Manage 301 redirects, track 404 errors, and improve your site. No knowledge of Apache or Nginx required.

wordpress.org

Support for 410 Redirects?

Support for 410 Redirects? Resolved Victor Font (@vfontj) 5 years, 10 months ago Redirecting all 404 errors to 301s is generally a bad SEO practice, especially for deleted content where the URLs sh…

wordpress.org

Documentation for 410 redirection:

Redirect Actions – Redirection

redirection.me

The available codes are:

• 401 – unauthorised access
• 404 – standard 404 error page and indicates the page is not currently available, but may become available in the future
• 410 – page gone and indicates the page is no longer available and won’t be available in the future