301 page into a 404
-
Hi
I have a job board site and the way the site is built means that I cant 404 job pages once they have expired. To combat this Im looking to 301 the pages into a 404 page.Do any of you have any experience with this? Are there any potential pitfalls to doing a 404 this way?
Thanks
-
If you can do a 301 you should be able to do a 404
-
One of my clients has a busy e-commerce site and regularly removes entire ranges of products (which are seasonal). As soon as this is done we update the sitemap.xml and that sitemap is linked to Google Webmaster Tools. As such the 404s don't appear for very long at all, because the sitemap is used to determine which pages to crawl. Therefore the deleted pages are dropped and don't cause any issues (you can monitor this via Google Webmaster Tools).
-
Hey Neenor
We would like to do that in the future but it require development time we dont have at the moment (create a 404 page with a list of similar jobs). Im more concerned about the fact Google sees that we are regularly sending them to 404 pages through 301 redirects when a job listing has expired.
-
Hi
If it's a small site you could manually update the expired job to say that the job is no longer available 'but you might like the following' and link to similar jobs. It would keep the visitor on your site and perhaps lead them to something they'd be interested in.
If you want to automate it I'd set up a standard 404 with a site search in it to recommend searching further (as opposed to losing the visitor completely). Not sure why it wouldn't be possible to set up a 404?
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
-
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
Page Authority
Hi We have a large number of pages, all sitting within various categories. I am struggling to rank a level 3 for example, or increase authority of this page. Apart from putting it in the main menu or trying to build quality links to it, are there any other methods I can try? We have so many pages I find it hard to workout what the best way to internal link these pages for authority. At the moment they're classified in their relevant categories, but these go from level 1 down to 4 - is this too many classification levels?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
301 or 404 Question for thin content Location Pages we want to remove
Hello All, I have a Hire Website with many categories and individual location pages for each of the 70 depots we operate. However, being dynamic pages, we have thousands of thin content pages. We have decided to only concentrate on our best performing locations and get rid of the rest as its physically impossible to write unique content for all our location pages for every categories. Therefore my question is. Would it cause me problems by having to many 301's for the location pages I am going to re-direct ( i was only going to send these back to the parent category page) or should I just 404 all those location pages and at some point in the future when we are in a position to concentrate on these locations then redo them with new content ? in terms of url numbers It would affect a few thousand 301's or 404's depending on people thoughts. Also , does anyone know what percentage of thin content on a site should be acceptable ?.. I know , none is best in an ideal world but it would be easier if there we could get away with a little percentage. We have been affected by Panda , so we are trying to tidy things up as best at possible, Any advice greatly appreciated? thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Should We Add the W3.org Language Tag To Every Page Or Just The Home Page?
Greetings, We have five international sites around the world, two of which are in difference languages. Currently we have the following line of html code on the home page of each of the sites: Clearly, we need to change the "en" portion for the sites that aren't in English, but, should we include that meta tag in each of the site's pages, or will the home page suffice. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CSawatzky0 -
Soft 404
Hey forum, My site is a Price Comparison site. Lately I've been getting some "Soft 404" errors with the Webmaster tool. I'll try to explain the steps causing it: 1. There's a valid link to a product 2. At some point the product is temporary out of stock or unavailable. 3. Google crawls this product page, getting a valid page with a message explaining this product is unavailable at this time. 4. Google see this page for few different products and (I assume) figures it's a none existing page and so it's a soft 404. The possible solutions I see are: 1. Return real 404, I'm not a fan of this solution, because these links will very likely be valid again when the product is back in stock. 2. Live with some "soft 404" errors in the webmaster tool. 3. Find another way to explain to Google that it's not a real 404. This sounds great but I'm not sure how this can be done. Any thoughts which would be the best method? Or maybe another solution I haven't thought of? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corwin0 -
SEOMOZ crawl all my pages
SEOMOZ crawl all my pages including ".do" (all web pages after sign up ) . Coz of this it finishes all my 10.000 crawl page quota and be exposed to dublicate pages. Google is not crawling pages that user reach after sign up. Because these are private pages for customers I guess The main question is how we can limit SEOMOZ crawl bot. If the bot can stay out of ".do" java extensions it'll perfect to starting SEO analysis. Do you know think about it? Cheers Example; .do java extension (after sign up page) (Google can't crawl) http://magaza.turkcell.com.tr/showProductDetail.do?psi=1001694&shopCategoryId=1000021&model=Apple-iPhone-3GS-8GB Normal Page (Google can crawl) http://magaza.turkcell.com.tr/telefon/Apple-iPhone-3GS-8GB/1001694/.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hcetinsoy0 -
Will Google Visit Non-Canonicalized Page Again and Return Its Page's Original Ranking?
I have 2 questions about canonicalization. 1. Will Google ever visit Page A again if after it has been canonicalized to Page B? 2. If Google will still visit Page A and found that it is not canonicalizing to Page B already, will the original rankings and traffic of Page A returned to the way before it's canonicalized? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalsources.com0