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Seo - Force error 404 page message for non canonical urls

Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2018 4:58 am
by Mich-adg
Hi,

for a seo purpose, is it a way to force all urls that are not canonical to display an "page not found - 404" message?


Thx !

Re: Seo - Force error 404 page message for non canonical url

Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2018 9:15 am
by velden
I think so, but at the same time I guess it won't improve SEO.

Just implement canonical meta tags https://support.google.com/webmasters/a ... 9066?hl=en

Re: Seo - Force error 404 page message for non canonical url

Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2018 11:49 am
by Mich-adg
Thanks, i already have the meta canonical in each page / article of my site. Even with the meta canonical in place, many Seo specialistes says that we must display error 404 page when we try to modify an url. Actually you can modify an url (ex = adding "mytextefromnowhere" on an url http://www.mysite.com/mytextfromnowhere ... alias.html still displays the page ! Ok the canonical show the good url in the code, but this shouldn't be possible).

Re: Seo - Force error 404 page message for non canonical url

Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2018 11:59 am
by Jo Morg
The SEO specialists saying that are wrong. All Content Management Systems have several entry points to the same page: it's specific to the way they work and it's a good thing. All search engines account for that and only honor the canonical, that's part of the way this works.
Forcing a 404 makes no sense at all.

Re: Seo - Force error 404 page message for non canonical url

Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2018 2:28 pm
by DIGI3
You could do silly hacks to try to redirect to a 404 page, but that won't stop bots from seeing the page first. There may be other tricks you could do to show a noindex or something if the visited url doesn't match the canonical, but all of this is already handled by the canonical tag. Multiple entry points do not hurt SEO if you use canonical correctly. Period.

Re: Seo - Force error 404 page message for non canonical url

Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2018 9:06 pm
by Dr.CSS
Where would these non canonical URLs be coming from, certainly not from a search engine as all they do is index the links on a web site, now if you are getting bad links from search engines then I would worry about a 404 page...

Anybody can type URLs that lead nowhere or add nonsense to an existing URL but that has nothing to do with SEO...