Switching from gomobi to Responsive

How to get rid of gomobi 404s.

[Lorel]

I switched a site from gomobi to responsive design about a month ago, however I'm still getting 404's in GSC from gomobi.

I assume if I set up a 410 for Gomobi I'll still get 410 errors. Is there a better way to handle this?

I searched the net for getting rid of Gomobi and can only find redirects from the old site to Gomobi.

[phranque]

however I'm still getting 404's in GSC from gomobi.

if it is appropriate you could send a 301 response and redirect the requests for "gomobi" urls to the equivalent new urls on the responsive site.
however, if you are serving 404s for these requests then that's what you should expect to see in GSC...

[keyplyr]

I'm still seeing 404's in GSC from pages I had 20 years ago. The errors may never go away.

You can stop the GSC errors by disallowing those files in your robots.txt or you can ignore them.

[Lorel]

@phranque and @Keyplr

Thanks. I'll try both of those suggestions.

[phranque]

I wouldn't disallow those requests.
You should send the appropriate response for each request.
Either 301 to an equivalent page, 410 for known legacy URLs that are actually gone now, 404 for everything else.
A 404/410 is not an "error" unless you expected content or a 301 response.

[keyplyr]

A 404/410 is not an "error" unless you expected content or a 301 response.

True, even though GSC likes to make us feel that way.

What really gets me are these requests for non-existent files. At one time, GSC would say where Googlebot found the link; helpful so we could investigate and fix them. Now the error report uses the very same non-existent file path as the source of the link. Aside from being total BS, how does this help us?

[Lorel]

@phranque

The problem with setting up a 301 is there are about 200 pages.
With that many additions to an htaccess file won't that affect page speed?

[phranque]

With that many additions to an htaccess file won't that affect page speed?

yes/but/if...
it might be negligible but it's easy to test.

if you have access to the config file the directives only get processed once when the server is started.

if you are on shared hosting, there are techniques to make the mod_rewrite directives in your .htaccess file work more efficiently if necessary.
if you can identify a pattern in the redirectable requests you can use regular expressions to match theses requests and minimize the number of RewriteRules required and possibly rewrite these requests to a script that handles the redirect response.
if you can use these patterns in the RewriteRule (vs a RewriteCond) the rule won't fire if the pattern doesn't match.
you can order the more commonly requested patterns first since the subsequent rules will typically be ignored (ie using the [L] flag).
you can make your regular expressions match efficiently efficiently if you can avoid some features.

[Lorel]

Ok, thanks.