When running a law firm’s website, most of the SEO attention tends to go toward content, backlinks, and schema markup. But there’s another layer of optimization that often goes unnoticed—how your website handles errors and outdated content, especially 404 and 405 pages. While these might seem like back-end technical details, they can quietly affect your site’s rankings, crawlability, and user experience.
At Attorney Marketing USA, we help law firms go beyond surface-level SEO. That includes fine-tuning how your website handles missing or restricted pages using tools like noindex, follow meta tags. In this article, we’ll break down why these tags matter, how they work, and how using them smartly can protect your rankings and ensure that your site continues to perform.
Understanding 404 and 405 Errors
Let’s start with the basics:
404 – Not Found: This error appears when a user or search engine tries to access a page that doesn’t exist. It’s the digital equivalent of a broken link.
405 – Method Not Allowed: This one’s a bit more technical. It means the server recognized the request but doesn’t allow the specific method (usually a non-GET request like POST or PUT). While rare, 405s can appear during form submission issues or improper redirects.
For a law firm’s website, these errors typically occur when:
A practice area or blog page is removed
A page is renamed without a redirect
Legal documents like your privacy policy are updated and URLs change
A user attempts to access restricted content
While some of this is inevitable as your firm grows and your website evolves, the way your site responds to these situations matters a lot.
The SEO Problem with Default Error Pages
When a 404 or 405 page is encountered and nothing is done to manage how it's indexed, search engines may:
Continue crawling and indexing the broken page
Waste crawl budget (especially harmful for larger websites)
Trigger soft 404s, which may dilute SEO signals
Delay deindexing, causing outdated or inaccurate content to show up in search results
That’s where the noindex, follow directive comes in.
What “Noindex, Follow” Really Means
The meta robots tag is a signal to search engines about what they should or shouldn’t do with a particular page. You’ll often see it in the form of:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
What this does:
noindex: Tells search engines not to index this page—in other words, don’t show it in search results.follow: Tells search engines to continue following any links on the page to other internal pages.
When applied to 404 or 405 pages, this helps preserve the value of internal linking, ensures crawlers keep moving through your site, and removes irrelevant or broken URLs from search results.
Benefits of Using “Noindex, Follow” on 404 and 405 Pages
1. Keeps Search Results Clean
Imagine a potential client Googling your firm and finding an outdated link to your old “Privacy Policy 2021” page—or worse, a 404 result that leads nowhere. These broken listings damage your reputation and your click-through rate.
Adding noindex, follow ensures Google eventually removes those URLs from the index without stopping link equity from flowing to your valid pages.
2. Prevents SEO Stagnation During Content Updates
Legal websites occasionally update documents like Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, or Retainer Agreements — sometimes resulting in URL changes due to versioning, site restructuring, or jurisdictional content. If these old URLs aren't properly managed, they can remain indexed in Google for months.
Using noindex, follow helps deindex outdated versions efficiently while preserving your site's link structure and crawl path.
3. Protects Crawl Budget and Site Health
Google allocates a limited crawl budget to each website. If bots waste time crawling broken or restricted pages, your fresh content (like new blog posts or case studies) may get ignored or delayed.
Applying noindex, follow to 404/405 pages guides search engines to ignore what’s irrelevant and focus on what’s valuable.
4. Maintains Link Equity
Even error pages can have backlinks. When you tag them with noindex, follow, you’re telling search engines:
"This page isn’t worth indexing, but the links it points to might still be."
This way, you preserve the link equity without keeping an error page in the search results.
5. Reduces Legal Risk and Confusion
If you make changes to legal disclosures or remove sensitive outdated content, you don’t want those pages lingering in Google's cache or index. Noindex ensures fast removal, while follow supports the rest of your website structure.
When and Where to Use This Strategy
For law firms, we recommend applying the noindex, follow tag in the following scenarios:
| Page Type | Use noindex, follow? |
Why |
|---|---|---|
| Deleted Practice Areas | ✅ Yes | You’ve removed the service but want to preserve navigation to current ones |
| Old Privacy Policies / Terms | ✅ Yes | Prevent outdated versions from being indexed |
| Temporary 404s during redesign | ✅ Yes | Helps protect SEO during transitions |
| Dead or duplicate URLs | ✅ Yes | Clears clutter from search results |
| Restricted login or post-only areas (405) | ✅ Yes | Keeps private content private, but allows links to be followed |
Method 2: Use Your CMS or SEO Plugin
If your site is built on WordPress, plugins like Yoast or Rank Math let you add robots tags per page—including 404 pages—without touching code.
Method 3: Use .htaccess or Server-Side Headers
For advanced setups, you can serve X-Robots-Tag: noindex, follow in your HTTP response headers for specific error codes.
Important Notes
Don’t block 404 pages with robots.txt—it prevents crawling entirely, which means Google can’t see your
noindextag.Use consistent canonical URLs on your remaining pages to reinforce which versions should be indexed.
Always monitor error pages and deindexed URLs in Google Search Console to track progress and fix issues early.
Final Thoughts
For law firms, managing how search engines handle error pages and outdated content isn’t just technical hygiene—it’s a smart SEO move. Properly using noindex, follow tags on 404 and 405 pages can clean up your search presence, conserve your crawl budget, and ensure your firm looks trustworthy and professional in the eyes of both clients and algorithms.
At Attorney Marketing USA, we take a comprehensive approach to SEO for attorneys. From error handling and structured data to link strategy and content, we help your website run lean, clean, and optimized to convert.
Need help auditing and cleaning up your law firm’s technical SEO issues? Reach out to our team today for a free SEO audit and action plan tailored to your site.
