How to switch from URL based navigation to Ajax, 1000's of URLs gone
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Hi everyone,
We have thousands of urls generated by numerous products filters on our ecommerce site, eg./category1/category11/brand/color-red/size-xl+xxl/price-cheap/in-stock/.
We are thinking of moving these filters to ajax in order to offer a better user experience and get rid of these useless urls.
In your opinion, what is the best way to deal with this huge move ?
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leave the existing URLs respond as before : as they will disappear from our sitemap (they won't be linked anymore), I imagine robots will someday consider them as obsolete ?
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redirect permanent (301) to the closest existing url
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mark them as gone (4xx)
I'd vote for option 2. Bots will suddenly see thousands of 301, but this is reflecting what is really happening, right ? Do you think this could result in some penalty ?
Thank you very much for your help.
Jeremy
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Thank you Dimitri, we fully agree with your proposal !
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Hi there.
If I understand your situation correctly - now filters for products have actual urls and you want to use filters with ajax on the same url - then yes, just do redirects. However, you can't do redirect to ajax filter, so you'd be redirecting to categories, I guess. 4xx surely is not the way to go, as well as option 1 you suggesting, since it would result in 404s.
Maybe canonical links could help - not sure though. I say go with 301s.
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