404 Pages. Can I change it to do this without getting penalized ? I want to lower our bounce rate from these pages to encourage the user to continue on the site

[PeteC12]

Hi All,

We have been streaming our site and got rid of thousands of pages for redundant locations (Basically these used to be virtual locations where we didn't have a depot although we did deliver there and most of them was duplicate/thin content etc ). Most of them have little if any link value and I didn't want to 301 all of them as we already have quite a few 301's already

We currently display a 404 page but I want to improve on this. Current 404 page is -  http://goo.gl/rFRNMt

I can get my developer to change it, so it will still be a 404 page but the user will see the relevant category page instead ?

So it will look like this -  http://goo.gl/Rc8YP8   . We could also use Java script to show the location name etc...

Would be be okay ? or would google see this as cheating.

basically I want to lower our bounce rates from these pages but still be attractive enough for the user to continue in the site and not go away.  If this is not a good idea, then any recommendations on improving our current 404 would be greatly appreciated.

thanks

Pete

[PeteC12]

Many thanks both

I previously had locations in these places but now we don't hence the 404's.

thanks

Peter

[AlexMcKee]

There's no law that says a 404 page has to be dull and unengaging. Back in the palaeolithic era of the web if we saw a lot of hits to the 404 page in the server logs we rarely knew why (finding broken links was a lot harder in those days) so we tried to capitalize and added engaging graphics and search boxes, copy designed to improve the retention of all these poor lost souls.

Working on your 404 page can actually be a really good experience. With the tools at developers disposal today it should be super easy to work out the context of the 404 error and show something useful to the user and win them over.

All that said if you find yourself relying on this technique in 2014 it is probably a sign something has gone wrong with the site's information architecture. Restoring the category page but serving a 404 is probably a no-no - you're essentially saying "no, this doesn't exist" to automatons (user agents and search crawlers) but you are showing the user the page they were presumably looking for. Finding yourself in a situation where you are sending deceitful HTTP headers is a clear sign something is wrong.

If the pages are useful and visited, restore them and work on making them better. If they aren't useful enough then you should probably 301 to a relevant useful page. Don't worry about having too many 301s, redirecting is the technically correct thing to do in such situations and your search engine of choice can hardly penalize you for using HTTP features correctly.

[adamxj2]

Just curious…

How would you get the 404 page content to reflect the category related to the search?

[Host1]

I can't see a problem with changing it. Seeing that you removed a lot of pages due to cleaning up the site i would think that the normal thing to do is not to show a 404-page, but either redirect to the proper page/category, or show something like the example you linked to.