Proper way to 404 a page on an Ecommerce Website
-
Hello. I am working on a website that has over 15000 products.
When one of these is no longer available - like it's discontinued or something - the page it's on 302s to a 404 page.
Example - www.greatdomain.com/awesome-widget
Awesome widget is no longer available
302s to
-www.greatdomain.com/404 page.
For the most part, these are not worthy of 301s because of lack of page rank/suitable LPs, but is this the correct way to handle them for search engines? I've seen varying opinions.
Thanks!
-
Hi Nakul,
I appreciate your willingness to help! We actually resolved the issue with help from our developer - standard 404 page - both to viewer and bots - but we've implemented a routine to regularly search for viable redirects to eliminate as many as possible.
On a related note - pretty good post on SEOmoz blog today about this very topic - coincidence?!
-
PM me your website URL with example 404/302 of the discontinued products.
-
Hi Nakul,
These products would be gone forever - like a discontinued item.
The 302 to 404 is my main concern - I agree with each of you that from a UEx perspective redirecting to relevant category pages is ideal.
Is this a standard way of setting this up on a large website (I didn't do it and it seems strange to me). Is there a better way (strictly from the SE perspective?).
Thanks.
-
Agree with Sean. If you were a user and searched for 'Stainless Steel Cookware Set with 4 Saucepans' and that product no longer became available, would you rather land on a 404 page or a 'Cookware Set' or 'Stainless Steel Cookware' type category page?
-
If these product goes away, do you expect them to go away forever or they may come back when they are in stock ? Are these "out of stock" scenarios or is it a gone forever scenario ?
If they are gone forever, a 301 to a category page make sense from usability perspective. If I am a blogger and I blogged about a product of yours, linking to it...I and all my users would prefer/expect the link to be working. If it's not available, out of stock message or if it's gone forever, a 301 to a category page or a plain 404 is better. Why do you have a 302 / Temporary redirect to a 404 page ? Are these really temporarily gone products or permanently gone ?
-
I am not saying this strictly from a link juice but also from a user experience. I would much rather hit another page than hit a 404 with an image.
-
Thanks Sean. I'm not too concerned about 301s in this case - any products that are worth the link would show up in webmaster tools - and search engines expect a certain number of 404s returned. I'm just wondering if this is the correct way to report the 404 error to the engines - with a 302 onto a 404 page? Temporary redirects have me scared. Thanks.
-
Depending how customizable your platform is, you could if discontinued, 301 to next level page in the breadcrumbs. Which would be a category/sub category page
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
-
New Pages in my Shopify website is not indexing
Hi The Service area pages created on my Shopify website is not indexing on google for a long time, Tried indexing the pages manually and also submitted the sitemap but still the pages doesn't seem to get indexed.
Technical SEO | | Bhisshaun
Thanks in Advance.0 -
Unique page for each product variant? (Not eCommerce)
Hi Mozzers, Just looking for a little advice before I launch into a huge workload. We have landing pages for vehicle manufacturers. We then have anchor links in that page for each vehicle model that manufacturer has, with further info on the model further down the page. So we're toying with the idea of launching a unique page for each of the models rather than having them all on the same landing page. This will take an age and a minute but if it is worth it, we want to do it. Do you guys see a benefit to having unique pages for each model? Do you think it would attract more natural links? Would this help or hinder the manufacturer landing page in general? Should the manufacturer landing page be noindex so as to avoid duplicate content issues? I can see a lot of work and risk, just looking for a few opinions. PM for more info. Thanks a lot people, Jamie
Technical SEO | | SanjidaKazi0 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
How can I change the page title "two" (artigos/page/2.html) in each category ?
I have some categories and photo galleries that have more than one page (i.e.: http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos and http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos/page/2). I think that I must change the tittle and description, but I don't how. I would like to know how can I change the title of each of them without stay with duplicate title and description. Thank you! ahcAORR.jpg
Technical SEO | | otimizador20130 -
404 errors is webmaster - should I 301 all pages?
Currently working on a retail site that shows over 1200 404 errors coming from urls that are from products that were on the site, but have now been removed as they are seasonal/out of stock. What is the best way of dealing with this situation ongoing? I am aware of the fact that these 404s are being marked as url errors in Google Webmaster. Should I redirect these 404s to a more appropriate live page or should I leave them as they are and not redirect them? I am concerned that Google may give the site a penalty as these 404s are growing (as the site is a online retail store and has products removed from its page results regularly). I thought Google was able to recognise 404s and after a set period of time would push them out of the error report. Also is there a tool out there that on mass I can run all the 404s urls through to see their individual page strength and the number of links that point at each one? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma0 -
Dealing with 404 pages
I built a blog on my root domain while I worked on another part of the site at .....co.uk/alpha I was really careful not to have any links go to alpha - but it seems google found and indexed it. The problem is that part of alpha was a copy of the blog - so now soon we have a lot of duplicate content. The /alpha part is now ready to be taken over to the root domain, the initial plan was to then delete /alpha. But now that its indexed I'm worried that Ill have all these 404 pages. I'm not sure what to do.. I know I can just do a 301 redirect for all those pages to go to the other ones in case a link comes on but I need to delete those pages as the server is already very slow. Or does a 301 redirect mean that I don't need those pages anymore? Will those pages still get indexed by google as separate pages? Please assist.
Technical SEO | | borderbound0 -
Frequent updating of pages on website to rank better
Will updating each page often for example everyday or few days, rank the page and/or website better in google. The reason I ask is that I made 18 websites about three months ago and the traffic initially was alot higher and has fallen little by little thru the 3 months. Also how well my pages rank has also fallen. I just put out the websites, have done nothing else. No linking, etc. No updates. It is evident that without new links coming in, the website will fall in rank ie., link aquistion velocity But my question is if I update the pages and change content frequently will this improve my position in google and other search engines. The traffic on websites over the three months if graphed sort of looks like a stair case going down.
Technical SEO | | mickey110 -
Canonical on ecommerce pages
I have seen some competitors using the nofollow tag as well as canonical on all refinements and sorts on their ecommerce pages. Example being if you went to their hard drive category page and refined by 500gb hard drives then that page would have a canonical element to send it back to hard drives page without the refinement. I see how this could be good for control indexation and the amount pages Google crawls, but do you see problems in using the canonical tag this way? Also I have seen competitors have category page descriptions (describing what that type of product is) on all pagenation and refinements (the exact same block of text on all of the pages). Would this be a duplicate content problem or is it not that big of a deal since the content is only on their site so they are only competiting with themselves. Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | Gordian0