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
-
Home Pages of Several Websites are disappearing / reappearing in Google Index
Hi, I periodically use the Google site command to confirm that our client's websites are fully indexed. Over the past few months I have noticed a very strange phenomenon which is happening for a small subset of our client's websites... basically the home page keeps disappearing and reappearing in the Google index every few days. This is isolated to a few of our client's websites and I have also noticed that it is happening for some of our client's competitor's websites (over which we have absolutely no control). In the past I have been led to believe that the absence of the home page in the index could imply a penalty of some sort. This does not seem to be the case since these sites continue to rank the same in various Google searches regardless of whether or not the home page is listed in the index. Below are some examples of sites of our clients where the home page is currently not indexed - although they may be indexed by the time you read this and try it yourself. Note that most of our clients are in Canada. My questions are: 1. has anyone else experienced/noticed this? 2. any thoughts on whether this could imply some sort of penalty? or could it just be a bug in Google? 3. does Google offer a way to report stuff like this? Note that we have been building websites for over 10 years so we have long been aware of issues like www vs. non-www, canonicalization, and meta content="noindex" (been there done that in 2005). I could be wrong but I do not believe that the site would keep disappearing and reappearing if something like this was the issue. Please feel free to scrutinize the home pages to see if I have overlooked something obvious - I AM getting old. site:dietrichlaw.ca - this site has continually ranked in the top 3 for [kitchener personal injury lawyers] for many years. site:burntucker.com - since we took over this site last year it has moved up to page 1 for [ottawa personal injury lawyers] site:bolandhowe.com - #1 for [aurora personal injury lawyers] site:imranlaw.ca - continually ranked in the top 3 for [mississauga immigration lawyers]. site:canadaenergy.ca - ranks #3 for [ontario hydro plans] Thanks in advance! Jim Donovan, President www.wethinksolutions.com
Technical SEO | | wethink0 -
Page Authority for localized version of website
Hello everyone, I have a case here were I need to decide which steps to take to improve page authority (and thus SEO value) for the German pages on our site. We localized the English version into German at the beginning of 2015. www.memoq.com - English de.memoq.com - German By October 2015 we implemented href tags so that Google would index the pages according to their language. That implementation has been successful. There is one issue though: At that time, all our localized pages had only "1" point for Page Authority ("PA" in the Moz bar). At the beginning we though that this could be due to the fact that localization was done using subdomains (de.memoq.com) rather that subfolders (www.memoq.com/de). However, we decided not to implement changes and to let Google assess the work we had done with the href tags. Its been a while now, and still all our German pages keep having only "1" point for page authority. Plus we have keywords for which we rank in the top 10 in English (US Google Search), but this not the case for the translated version of the keywords for German (Germany Google search). So my question basically is: Is this lack of page authority and SEO value rooted in the fact that we used subdomain instead of subfolder for the URL creation. If so is it likely that Page Authority for German pages and SEO value will increase if I change the structure from subdomains to subfolders? Or is it that the problem in PA is rooted somewhere else that I am missing? I appreciate your feedback.
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Panda Cleanup - Removing Old Blog Posts, Let Them 404 or 301 to Main Blog Page?
tl;dr... Removing old blog posts that may be affected by Panda, should we let them 404 or 301 to the Blog? We have been managing a corporate blog since 2011. The content is OK but we've recently hired a new blogger who is doing an outstanding job, creating content that is very useful to site visitors and is just on a higher level than what we've had previously. The old posts mostly have no comments and don't get much user engagement. I know Google recommends creating great new content rather than removing old content due to Panda concerns but I'm confident we're doing the former and I still want to purge the old stuff that's not doing anyone any good. So let's just pretend we're being dinged by Panda for having a large amount of content that doesn't get much user engagement (not sure if that's actually the case, rankings remain good though we have been passed on a couple key rankings recently). I've gone through Analytics and noted any blog posts that have generated at least 1 lead or had at least 20 unique visits all time. I think that's a pretty low barrier and everything else really can be safely removed. So for the remaining posts (I'm guessing there are hundreds of them but haven't compiled the specific list yet), should we just let them 404 or do we 301 redirect them to the main blog page? The underlying question is, if our primary purpose is cleaning things up for Panda specifically, does placing a 301 make sense or would Google see those "low quality" pages being redirected to a new place and pass on some of that "low quality" signal to the new page? Is it better for that content just to go away completely (404)?
Technical SEO | | eBoost-Consulting0 -
404 errors
Hi I am getting these show up in WMT crawl error any help would be very much appreciated | ?ecaped_fragment=Meditation-find-peace-within/csso/55991bd90cf2efdf74ec3f60 | 404 | 12/5/15 |
Technical SEO | | ReSEOlve
| | 2 | mobile/?escaped_fragment= | 404 | 10/26/15 |
| | 3 | ?escaped_fragment=Tips-for-a-balanced-lifestyle/csso/1 | 404 | 12/1/15 |
| | 4 | ?escaped_fragment=My-favorite-yoga-spot/csso/5598e2130cf2585ebcde3b9a | 404 | 12/1/15 |
| | 5 | ?escaped_fragment=blog/c19s6 | 404 | 11/29/15 |
| | 6 | ?escaped_fragment=blog/c19s6/Tag/yoga | 404 | 11/30/15 |
| | 7 | ?escaped_fragment=Inhale-exhale-and-once-again/csso/2 | 404 | 11/27/15 |
| | 8 | ?escaped_fragment=classes/covl | 404 | 10/29/15 |
| | 9 | m/?escaped_fragment= | 404 | 10/26/15 |
| | 10 | ?escaped_fragment=blog/c19s6/Page/1 | 404 | 11/30/15 | | |0 -
New Page Showing Up On My Reports w/o Page Title, Words, etc - However, I didn't create it
I have a WordPress site and I was doing a crawl for errors and it is now showing up as of today that this page : https://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/event-registration/?event_id=551&name_of_event=HTML5 CSS3 is new and has no page title, words, etc. I am not even sure where this page or URL came from. I was messing with the robots.txt file to allow some /category/ posts that were being hidden, but I didn't re-allow anything with the above appendages. I just want to make sure that I didn't screw something up that is now going to impact my rankings - this was just a really odd message to come up as I didn't create this page recently - and that shouldnt even be a page accessible to the public. When I edit the page - it is using an Event Espresso (WordPress plugin) shortcode - and I don't want to noindex this page as it is all of my events. Sorry this post is confusing, any help or insight would be appreciated! I am also interested in hiring someone for some hourly consulting work on SEO type issues if anyone has any references. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | webbmason0 -
Is there a way for me to automatically download a website's sitemap.xml every month?
From now on we want to store all our sitemap.xml over the next years. Its a nice archive to have that allows us to analyse how many pages we have on our website and which ones were removed/redirected. Any suggestions? Thanks
Technical SEO | | DeptAgency0 -
Duplicate Page Title & Content Penalty On Website Tonight Platform
I built my primary website on Website Tonight (WT) five years ago when I was a net newbie and I'm presently new to seomoz. The initial crawl indicated a problem with duplicate page title and duplicate content with my website home page in WT. It turns out that the WT platform makes you assign a file name to your homepage i.e: www.business.com/homepage.html that differs from the www.business.com that you want as your homepage url. Apparently the search engines are recognizing these identical pages as separate and duplicate. I know that the standard answer would be to just do a 301 redirect from the long file name to the short file name - end of story. But WT does not allow you to do 301 redirects and they also do not give you the ability to go into the htaccess file to fix this yourself manually. I spoke to the folks at WT tonight and they claim that they automatically do 301 redirects on the platform. But if this true then why am I getting the error message in seomoz? Does anyone know if this is a problem? If so, does anyone here have a fix? Thanks in advance. Sincerely - Bill in Denver
Technical SEO | | anxietycoach0 -
How to attach at text to image that other websites use from my website
I often have other websites link to my website. They will do this with an image that they pull off of my website. (actually my website continues to serve the image). These inbound links are great, but they don't have alt text. Is there a way for me to attach alt text to the images, or is this something the other website needs to code themselves?
Technical SEO | | EugeneF0