How to best remove old pages for SEO
-
I run an accommodation web site, each listing has its own page. When a property is removed what is the best way to handle this for SEO because the URL will no longer be valid and there will be a blank page.
-
Stephanie Chang posted on just this subject last month on the blog at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content. Her post may help you with some ideas -- it was actually because of all of these types of questions in Q&A that she wrote the post.
-
It looks like your server is Linux possibly..Apache..running PHP.
If that's the case, you can build a page that you'd like to display for all pages that do not exist and upload it on the server as 404.php or whatever you might want to call it.
Then, add the following line in your .htaccess file.
ErrorDocument 404 /404.php
You are all set.
To me i looks like you are already set or doing this in some fashion. I checked to see if I visit http://www.visitdevonandcornwall.com/test and see what happens.
It gives me a friendly 404 and the HTTP Header is correct.
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found => Server => cloudflare-nginx Date => Fri, 11 May 2012 17:17:51 GMT Content-Type => text/html Connection => close X-Powered-By => PHP/5.3.6 Expires => Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control => no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma => no-cache Set-Cookie => __cfduid=d1b9e2169ed78a6697f752eef1c0a5ee01336756670; expires=Mon, 23-Dec-2019 23:50:00 GMT; path=/; domain=.www.visitdevonandcornwall.com
-
A home bodge job... url www.visitdevonandcornwall.com
-
What platform is your website ? You could also send me the URL via PM or post here and I can check.
-
I agree with the idea of the message, best user experience. Sadly people do not want their property showing, often because they change from a business to a residential property.
How do I show the page is a 404, is that a code snippet in the header or similar?
-
It would be best to make it a 404 or you could consider still having the property listed but mentioning it's no longer available and displaying similar / nearby / related properties on that page as long as it makes sense from both the usability / TOS and other business issues.
Think from a user's perspective. Let's say I took a URL of a property from your website and linked to it from my blog post where I am talking about my vacation or if I emailed it to friends/family. If that property is no longer available, what's a good user experience for people clicking on that link from my website or from my email. In my opinion, it might be a good idea to have a user friendly message saying that property is no longer available and displaying other related properties.
I hope that helps and makes sense.
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
-
Help Center/Knowledgebase effects on SEO: Is it worth my time fixing technical issues on no-indexed subdomain pages?
We're a SaaS company and have a pretty extensive help center resource on a subdomain (help.domain.com). This has been set up and managed over a few years by someone with no knowledge of SEO, meaning technical things like 404 links, bad redirects and http/https mixes have not been paid attention to. Every page on this subdomain is set to NOT be indexed in search engines, but we do sometimes link to help pages from indexable posts on the main domain. After spending time fixing problems on our main website, our site audits now flag almost solely errors and issues on these non-indexable help center pages every week. So my question is: is it worth my time fixing technical issues on a help center subdomain that has all its pages non-indexable in search engines? I don't manage this section of the site, and so getting fixes done is a laborious process that requires going through someone else - something I'd rather only do if necessary.
Technical SEO | | mglover19880 -
Best use of an old domain?
I've discovered that my clients website used to have another domain name, which they still own but don't use. It's doing OK considering its not been used for a few years - almost 6,000 backlinks showing on Majestic. So what's the best way of using this for SEO? I'm presuming some kind of redirecting? A simple redirect of everything on the domain to the new domain index page? Or going trough all the old pages and redirecting them one by one?
Technical SEO | | abisti20 -
Why google removed my landing pages from index?
I made new website meko.lv. I put many work to it, to make page SEO friendly, sprites, reduced requests added SSL, got google page speed insights score 100/100, but in 2. october all pages in google webmasters disappeared from index. Could you please look at website and say whats wrong with it? They are all search results present in google but for how long. it is so annoying, you put so many work but in result get high spam score. It is obvious that new pages can not get good links in one month https://meko.lv/ google webmasters google page speed score: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmeko.lv%2F&tab=mobile q1LDHTn
Technical SEO | | Mekounko0 -
Is it good to redirect million of pages on a single page?
My site has 10 lakh approx. genuine urls. But due to some unidentified bugs site has created irrelevant urls 10 million approx. Since we don’t know the origin of these non-relevant links, we want to redirect or remove all these urls. Please suggest is it good to redirect such a high number urls to home page or to throw 404 for these pages. Or any other suggestions to solve this issue.
Technical SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Why are only a few of our pages being indexed
Recently rebuilt a site for an auctioneers, however it has a problem in that none of the lots and auctions are being indexed by Google on the new site, only the pages like About, FAQ, home, contact. Checking WMT shows that Google has crawled all the pages, and I've done a "Fetch as Google" on them and it loads up fine, so there's no crawling issues that is standing out. I've set the "URL Parameters" to no effect too. Also built a sitemap with all the lots in, pushed to Google which then crawled them all (massive spike in Crawl rate for a couple days), and still just indexing a handful of pages. Any clues to look into would be greatly appreciated. https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/auctions/
Technical SEO | | Blue-shark0 -
132 pages reported as having Duplicate Page Content but I'm not sure where to go to fix the problems?
I am seeing “Duplicate Page Content” coming up in our
Technical SEO | | danatanseo
reports on SEOMOZ.org Here’s an example: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/williams-sound-ppa-r35-e http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/aphex-230-master-voice-channel-processor http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/AT-AE4100.prod These three pages are for completely unrelated products.
They are returning “200” status codes, but are being identified as having
duplicate page content. It appears these are all going to the home page, but it’s
an odd version of the home page because there’s no title. I would understand if these pages 301-redirected to the home page if they were obsolete products, but it's not a 301-redirect. The referring page is
listed as: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators None of the 3 links in question appear anywhere on that page. It's puzzling. We have 132 of these. Can anyone help me figure out
why this is happening and how best to fix it? Thanks!0 -
Top pages give " page not found"
A lot of my top pages point to images in a gallery on my site. When I click on the url under the name of the jpg file I get an error page not found. For instance this link: http://www.fastingfotografie.nl/architectuur-landschap/single-gallery/10162327 Is this a problem? Thanks. Thomas. JkLej.png
Technical SEO | | thomasfasting0 -
What's the best format for a e-commerce URL product page
We have over 2000 non branded experiences and activities sold through our website. The website is having a face lift with the a new look and a stronger focus on SEO. As part of this, I am keen to establish what the best practice is for product based URLs. I've researched the market and come up with a few alternatives that are used: domain/category/subcategory/activity_name domain/activity_name/category/subcategory/activity_reference domain/generic_term/activity_reference/activity_name domain/category/activity_location/activity_name Activities are location based but the location can change (say once every 2 years). Activity names, category, subcategory and activity_reference rarely change. Are there any thoughts/ research on the best method? (If there is one) Many thanks in advance for your insights.
Technical SEO | | philwill0