301 vs. 404
-
If a listing on a website is no longer available to display is it better to resolve to a 301 redirect or use a 404?
I know from an SEO point of view a 301 will pass on the link value, but is that as valuable as saying tto the user hey that page is no lonoger available try something else?
-
"Ensure your 404 page is helpful. It should contain your site's normal navigation bar along with a search box."
good point, there is nothing worse than a 404 with no information. Something to consider is the amount of fun you can do with the 404 landing page.
- Write a fun title
- Iframe a funny blooper youtube video
- Link to your most visited pages
- Link to your social platforms
- Write a joke
I have had good social reactions from this.
-
There is nothing wrong with allowing a page to 404. It is a perfectly natural part of the internet. With that said, a 301 vs 404 depends on your site.
If you offer a page on "2010 Best Websites" and you decide to remove the page due to it not being current, you may wish to consider a redirect to your "2011 Best Websites" page. Your role is to review your site and determine the page which is most likely to satisfy the user's need. By implementing a 301, you are helping your site retain the backlinks and helping users find the content they seek.
If you no longer carry a relevant page, then go ahead and let it 404. Ensure your 404 page is helpful. It should contain your site's normal navigation bar along with a search box.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
301 Question - issue
A while back we had a 'bleed' on one of our sites, which basically meant one of our sites started to leak across pages to another and that site started to rank for the same pages and now we have hundreds of pages ranking for urls that do not exists. It's hard to explain, bare with me. If you were to click on the cached view in Google for the ranked page it would show you the main site, but if you were to click it as usual, then you would be taken to the site but a 404 would show as the intended page was not for that site. We believe we fixed the 'bleed' and have setup 301s for all the affected pages to go to the home page for the site it affected. But these pages have not been removed from Google, which we thought a 301 would do. So we still have hundreds of pages being ranked but are redirected to the home page. Why hasn't these pages been removed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
When to Use Schema vs. Facebook Open Graph?
I have a client who for regulatory reasons cannot engage in any social media: no Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ accounts. No social sharing buttons allowed on the site. The industry is medical devices. We are in the process of redesigning their site, and would like to include structured markup wherever possible. For example, there are lots of schema types under MedicalEntity: http://schema.org/MedicalEntity Given their lack of social media (and no plans to ever use it), does it make sense to incorporate OG tags at all? Or should we stick exclusively to the schemas documented on schema.org?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Allie_Williams0 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
Is a 301 to a 301 ok?
I have a site that has a lot of url differences. Due to coding we sometimes have to 301 to a page that is 301'd to another. Is there any danger in doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
How to handle the 301 of a complete domain on URL level
We will be shutting down an old website with many (good) links, since the site has no strategic relevance anymore. We do have many other sites, but none of them has exactly the same content/topic. Nonetheless, I would like to keep the juice and redirect the site to another newer project. However, I want to redirect certain URLs of the old site to probably even different domains, depending on which content matches best with the alternative newer site. Does this make sense? Or would youjust redirect the whole domain to one other domain although they don't really have the same topic And how would you handle the URL redirects if the old site has more than 50k URLs? Because that is the case. Thanks for any advice
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Windex0 -
2-stage 301 redirects
Dear colleagues, I have quite an unusual situation with one of my client's websites, and I could use an advise from someone who experienced the same circumstances: They are currently planning on launching a new site under the same domain (by September), when several key current pages are intended to be replaced with new equivalent pages under new URLs. So far it's pretty simple, BUT - due to a merger with another company they will be migrating their entire website to a different domain within a year. My question is - what would be the optimal solution for redirects? We are considering a 301 from the current pages to the new pages under the same domain, and once the new domain is activated - aside from defining 301 redirects from the new pages under the same domain to the new domain, we will cancel the original 301 from the old pages to the new pages on the same domain, and instead define new 301 for those pages to the new domain. What do you think? Is there a better solution - like using 302 redirects for the first stage? Has anyone tried such a procedure? Your input will be highly appreciated! Thanks in advance, Omer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Usearch0 -
Using a 302 instead of a 301
I am trying to figure out the best way to garner the most amount of link value. We have an app that lives on a sub-domain ... For the purposes of this question, let's call it app.mydomain.com. We provide a service with this app that requires clients (with very high ranking websites) to link into app located on the sub-domain. Would I garner more authority if had the high ranking client website link into a url that wasn't a sub-domain and redirect it using a 302? For example: What if I created a 302 that was www.mydomain.com/app and have it redirected to the sub-domain version of app.mydomain.com? Additionally am I correct to assume that a 301 would merely pass that value to the sub domain and NOT provide much value to the root?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NextGenEDU0 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0