Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Increase 404 errors or 301 redirects?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Increase 404 errors or 301 redirects?

    Technical SEO
    4
    8
    2344
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Oxfordcomma
      Oxfordcomma last edited by

      Hi all,

      I'm working on an e-commerce site that sells products that may only be available for a certain period of time. Eg. A product may only be selling for 1 year and then be permanently out of stock. When a product goes out of stock, the page is removed from the site regardless of any links it may have gotten over time.

      I am trying to figure out the best way to handle these permanently out of stock pages. At the moment, the site is set up to return a 404 page for each of these products. There are currently 600 (and increasing) instances of this appearing on Google Webmasters. I have read that too many 404 errors may have a negative impact on your site, and so thought I might 301 redirect these URLs to a more appropriate page. However I've also read that too many 301 redirects may have a negative impact on your site.

      I foresee this to be an issue several years down the road when the site has thousands of expired products which will result in thousands of 404 errors or 301 redirects depending on which route I take.

      Which would be the better route? Is there a better solution?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • tomhall90
        tomhall90 @Oxfordcomma last edited by

        That's right.

        A soft 404 is still a missing document, but it allows the user to continue through the pages without leaving the website.

        Tom

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Oxfordcomma
          Oxfordcomma @tomhall90 last edited by

          Thanks Tom. Just want to clarify with you when you use the term "soft 404 page" in your context. You mean an actual page that exists, but basically lets the visitor know that the product is no longer available for various reasons right? Not a soft 404 url error that Google reports on Webmaster Tools.

          tomhall90 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • WesleySmits
            WesleySmits @Oxfordcomma last edited by

            That shouldn't hurt your site. I rebuild an e-commerce site which had 50.000 redirects in place at the moment i was working on it. Of course it adds a little bit of load to the server but it's not really noticable. This way you will keep the value of the old links.

            Thomas Hall is right about the soft 404 pages being generally more acceptable. If you care more about the user experience then about the value from your old links then you could build a dynamic 404 page.

            This page should tell the visitor that the product no longer exist and should give them a couple of products which are similar of relevant to the product they were searching for. This way you will improve the user experience with a soft 404.

            Just to be clear, you don't have to set a redirect to the home page. You could also do it to the category pages or to popular products. It's very difficult to say since i don't know which branch your in. Who your target group is and what they are interested in.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • Oxfordcomma
              Oxfordcomma @WesleySmits last edited by

              Hi Wesley, thanks for the response. I have no issues with your suggestion, my only concern is the amount of 301 redirection rules that may result of this. Like I said, in several years, the amount of 301 redirection rules can increase to the thousands. I'm afraid this will affect server load & page speed, therefore hurt my site.

              WesleySmits 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • MoosaHemani
                MoosaHemani Banned last edited by

                If you compare 404pages with 301redirections I believe 301 is a better option and here is why!

                When a visitor of your website reach to a page that is no more present on your website, they will find the 404 page which may leads the visitor to bounce from the website as usually 404 pages hurt user experience.

                The idea is to 301 them to appropriate pages so that they never see any broken page on the website and can easily perform the desired actions while continuing their journey on the website.

                This will also help increasing the time on site which will impact positively on your site nad rankings in search engines.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • tomhall90
                  tomhall90 last edited by

                  Hi there,

                  What Wesley said is true to a certain extent. This would probably be the best way to do it (301 Redirect) but as an owner of many eCommerce companies, I'd have to disagree. Mainly on the basis that a "soft 404" would be more generally accepted than just being redirected to the homepage for no explanation to why.

                  Here's an example, your client is selling TV's online and they're using Magento Enterprise. Let's pretend that they have a TV from Sony, it's a 62" LED SmartTV, Full HD, the works and your client has 200 of these in stock and they're selling them around $/£300 cheaper than the competition. The link gets shared around amongst Facebook, Twitter, HotUkDeals etc.

                  So let's say after just 7 days, they sell out of this awesome offer... Somebody see's the link late (Facebook, Twitter, etc, it happens) and when they click on that link the website loads but the product doesn't, they just see the homepage. They're going to waste around 15 minutes perhaps searching for that product that you and I both know, doesn't exist anymore.

                  So what we tend to do, is create a "soft 404" page, which is basically a page apologising for the missing product, explaining that it may be out of stock, temporarily removed from the website etc, but at the same time we will have an array of SIMILAR products that may interest someone who wanted a 62" LED Full HD SmartTV.

                  I don't know whether I'd say this is a great SEO advantage or a great marketing advantage, but either way, in my personal opinion, I'd say this is a much better option than just pointing the customer/browser to the homepage when they are in search of something specific and don't get a reason to why they're seeing the homepage and not the fantastic offer they've seen!

                  Hope this answer helps you, even if it's just insightful!

                  Tom

                  Oxfordcomma 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • WesleySmits
                    WesleySmits last edited by

                    The 301 redirect would be a better option.

                    I will try to explain why this is better than a 404 page.

                    1. If people posted a link to the product PageRank to your website.(This is one of the ranking factors in Google) If the page doesn't exist anymore and brings up the 404 page it will lose the value from all the links to that particular product. If you use a 301 redirect to send visitors to a relevant product or to the homepage then the value from those links will have effect on the page where you send them to.

                    2. Nobody likes a 404 page. There are very cool things you can do with a 404 page so that they are still helpful to the visitor such as most popular pages, a search function and even jokes. But in the end nobody would have clicked on the link or typed in the url to your website and think: Now i want to see his 404 page.

                    I hope i answered your question. Let me know if anything was unclear.

                    Oxfordcomma 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • 1 / 1
                    • First post
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    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.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • LouisPortier

                      Redirection chain and Javascript Redirect

                      Hi, A redirection chain is usually defined as a page redirecting to another page which itself is another redirection. URL1 ---(301/302)---> URL2 ---(301/302)---> URL3 But what about Javascript redirect? They seem to be a different beast: URL1 ---(301/302)---> URL2 ---(200 then Javascript redirect)---> URL3 From what I know if the javascript redirect is instant Google counts it as a 301 permanent redirection, but I'm still not sure about if this counts as a redirection chain. Most of the tools (such as moz) only see the first redirection. So is that scenario a redirection chain or no?

                      Technical SEO | | LouisPortier
                      0
                    • AliMac26

                      Duplicate content and 404 errors

                      I apologize in advance, but I am an SEO novice and my understanding of code is very limited. Moz has issued a lot (several hundred) of duplicate content and 404 error flags on the ecommerce site my company takes care of. For the duplicate content, some of the pages it says are duplicates don't even seem similar to me. additionally, a lot of them are static pages we embed images of size charts that we use as popups on item pages. it says these issues are high priority but how bad is this? Is this just an issue because if a page has similar content the engine spider won't know which one to index? also, what is the best way to handle these urls bringing back 404 errors? I should probably have a developer look at these issues but I wanted to ask the extremely knowledgeable Moz community before I do 🙂

                      Technical SEO | | AliMac26
                      0
                    • MichaelGregory

                      Hundreds of 404 errors are showing up for pages that never existed

                      For our site, Google is suddenly reporting hundreds of 404 errors, but the pages they are reporting never existed. The links Google shows are clearly spam style,  but the website hasn't been hacked. This happened a few weeks ago, and after a couple days they disappeared from WMT. What's the deal? Screen-Shot-2016-02-29-at-9.35.18-AM.png

                      Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory
                      0
                    • w0lfiesmithUK

                      Switching from a .org to .io (301 domain redirect)

                      I'm considering switching my main site from a .org to .io address; the .org is an exact match domain which helped to kickstart it a few years ago and now has about 50% repeat visitors, but was thrown off the Apple affiliation program for trademark infringement. I've found and purchased a nice (non-infringing) .io domain, and I've read the advice here on how to properly 301 the old domain; but my question is - does it matter that it's .io? Is this going to significantly hurt my rankings, even when everything has been 301'd properly? Another thought I had is that I may actually come out better off in the long run, what with Google penalties being applied to exact match domains. Is this a ranking suicide? If so, I'm tempted to leave it as is; even without the affiliation, it's making a good amount every month in ad fees that I don't want to disrupt. Thanks all!

                      Technical SEO | | w0lfiesmithUK
                      0
                    • bimmer540

                      A script to automatically write 301 redirect rules to htaccess?

                      I was wondering if anyone could help provide some resources on how to automatically write 301 redirect rules to htaccess.  Allow me to explain... I'm building a new website and the primary users are businesses.  They have their own profile pages on the site. The URL is based off of their Company Name. In the event that they decided to change their name... reasons being, perhaps they mispelled it the first time, or they're removing LLC or adding Inc, I want to also change the URL and redirect the old URL to the new URL. Since the URL is based off of their Company Name, making a change to the company name would make a change to the URL.  I know it doesn't have to work this way, but for our purpose this works best. In case the old URL had any links to it, I wanted to see if there was an way to automatically update an htaccess file with a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. Could anyone point me in the right direction of how to do this?  Perhaps a sample script.  I've done a lot of searches on Google and can't seem to find anything. e.g. Original:
                      Name:  XYZ Widgets
                      URL:  website.com/xyz-widgets New - business changes their company name in their profile:
                      Name:  XYZ Widgets, Inc.
                      URL:  website.com/xyz-widgets-inc Upon the user saving the changes in their profile, I'd like to write a 301 redirect to an htaccess file:
                      Redirect 301 /xyz-widgets http://www.website.com/xyz-widgets-inc I know how to manually write redirects and I've got a pretty smart web developer.  We've just never triggered a script to automatically write to an htaccess file before. Is this possible?  Any resources are appreciated.  Any security risks? Thanks!

                      Technical SEO | | bimmer540
                      0
                    • bewoldt

                      How to create a delayed 301 redirect that still passes juice?

                      My company is merging one of our sites into another site. At first I was just going to create a 301 redirect from domainA.com to domainB.com but we decided that would be too confusing for customers expecting to see domainA.com so we want to create a page that says something like "We've moved. please visit domainB.com or be redirected after 10 seconds". My question is, how do I create a redirect that has a delay and will this still pass the same amount of juice that a regular 301 redirect would? I've heard that meta refreshes are considered spammy by Google.

                      Technical SEO | | bewoldt
                      0
                    • anchorwave

                      Best 404 Error Checker?

                      I have a client with a lot of 404 errors from Web Master Tools, and i have to go through and check each of the links because Some redirect to the correct page Some redirect to another url but its a 404 error Some are just 404 errors Does anyone know of a tool where i can dump all of the urls and it will tell me If the url is redirected, and to where if the page is a 404 or other error Any tips or suggestions will be really appreciated! Thanks SEO Moz'rs

                      Technical SEO | | anchorwave
                      0
                    • dim_d

                      Why is a 301 redirected url still getting indexed?

                      We recently fixed a redirect issue in a website, and although it appears that the redirection is working fine, the url in question keeps on getting crawled, indexed and cached by google. The redirect was done a month ago, and google shows cached version of it, even for a couple of days ago. Manual checking shows that its being redirected, and also a couple of online tools i checked report a 301 redirect. Do you have any idea why this could be happening? The website I'm talking about is www.hotelmajestic.gr and its being redirected to www.hotel-majestic.gr

                      Technical SEO | | dim_d
                      0

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    • Digital Marketers
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.