404 vs 410 vs 301

[LoonyToons]

Hi guys,

I am managing a real estate website, and obviously we have a LOT of pages detailing each property.

As those properties get sold and removed from the website, I'm wondering how best to handle this - I know 404, 410 and 301's are all valid ways to go, but I want to provide the best UX combined with the best SEO effect.

My thinking is to customise a 410 page to show the page has been permanently removed, and has a relevant message (rather than a generic 404 message) and shows a search box - possibly pre-populated according to the page they were looking for.
I think this gives a good UX and helps Google to understand the importance of the 000's of pages on our website.
I'd also like to clear property detail 404's as quick as possible to make it easier to see if we have problems elsewhere on the site.

Having explained this to our development/SEO agency, they are strongly pushing for 301 redirects or leave as 404.
I think 301's would be the worst for UX, and as explained earlier, the volume of 404's is massive and makes it difficult to see real errors. They seem to think this is a better UX and better for SEO.

Just wondering what you guys would recommend?

[LoonyToons]

Thanks to both of you!

I think if we can get the pages customised properly, then redirecting to the main search page may be the way to go - with the SEO friendly urls we have, I hope we can set a search set up all ready for the user, and a nice custom message to let them know why they've arrived there!

[ZoeRigley]

Hi,

This is a great article (on the Moz Blog) on how to handle expired content. It mentions pros and cons of the different methods, and though it's from 2012 I think it's still highly relevant. In particular it talks through adding 301 redirects with custom messages, so that you can explain to your visitors that the property has been sold already, and redirect them to a search page, list of nearby properties, or similar. I'd make this really clear, with a bold message of 'Property sold!' or something similar, to avoid quick bounces.

I would personally avoid 404s or 410s, as even if your resulting page is helpful, some users are likely to bounce from this page without even reading the content and realising it's helpful to them. Also, of course, it completely stops the link value of the previous page.

I'd try to get the best of all worlds, and aim for the most user-friendly 301s possible as explained above.

Hope this helps! 
Zoe

[VERBInteractive]

I believe you are doing this to deal with individual property pages that no longer exist after they have sold. A fear to consider with using the 410 to deal with these pages is that f this property ever comes back on the market you have permanently marked this URL as gone and might have issue getting a URL with the same structure back in the index.

I have a similar issue with a client who offers travel deals with a specific time frame and the way we have handled it is we have a custom 404 handler, that when visiting a travel deal that longer exists before the 404 page returns the http status of 404 it 301 redirects the user to the man travel deal page. The reason we took this approach was so any legacy backlinks to travel deals will still give the user a list of deals that are relevant to why they followed the link in the past. We can also bring back annual specials without having to make changes to the .htaccess. This approach helped us maintain existing Authority from previous backlinks, significantly reduced 404's (which in turn let us focus on the more specific real errors)

BTW, there is no reason why you can't have a search page on a 404 page. In fact I would recommend it.