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?
-
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?
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
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
-
Delete old blog posts after 301 redirects to new pages?
Hi Moz Community, I've recently created several new pages on my site using much of the same copy from blog posts on the same topics (we did this for design flexibility and a few other reasons). The blogs and pages aren't exactly identical, as the new pages have much more content, but I don't think there's a point to having both and I don't want to have duplicate content, so we've used 301 redirects from the old blog posts to the new pages of the same topic. My question is: can I go ahead and delete the old blog posts? (Or would there be any reasons I shouldn't delete them?) I'm guessing with the 301 redirects, all will be well in the world and I can just delete the old posts, but I wanted to triple check to make sure. Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | TaraLP1 -
What to do with old content after 301 redirect
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
Technical SEO | | LindsayE0 -
404 Error Pages being picked up as duplicate content
Hi, I recently noticed an increase in duplicate content, but all of the pages are 404 error pages. For instance, Moz site crawl says this page: https://www.allconnect.com/sc-internet/internet.html has 43 duplicates and all the duplicates are also 404 pages (https://www.allconnect.com/Coxstatic.html for instance is a duplicate of this page). Looking for insight on how to fix this issue, do I add an rel=canonical tag to these 60 error pages that points to the original error page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kfallconnect0 -
How big is the problem: 404-errors as result of out of stock products?
We had a discussion about the importance of 404-errors as result of products which are out of stock. Of course this is not good, but what is the leverance in terms of importance: low-medium-high?
Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG0 -
Redirect URLS with 301 twice
Hello, I had asked my client to ask her web developer to move to a more simplified URL structure. There was a folder called "home" after the root which served no purpose. I asked for the URLs to be redirected using 301 to the new URLs which did not have this structure. However, the web developer didn't agree and decided to just rename the "home" folder "p". I don't know why he did this. We argued the case and he then created the URL structure we wanted. Initially he had 301 redirected the old URLS (the one with "Home") to his new version (the one with the "p"). When we asked for the more simplified URL after arguing, he just redirected all the "p" URLS to the PAGE NOT FOUND. However, remember, all the original URLs are now being redirected to the PAGE NOT FOUND as a result. The problems I see are these unless he redirects again: The new simplified URLS have to start from scratch to rank 2)We have duplicated content - two URLs with the same content Customers clicking products in the SERPs will currently find that they are being redirect to the 404 page. I understand that redirection has to occur but my questions are these: Is it ok to redirect twice with 301 - so old URL to the "p" version then to final simplified version. Will link juice be lost doing this twice? If he redirects from the original URLS to the final version missing out the "p" version, what should happen to the "p" version - they are currently indexed. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
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:
Technical SEO | | bimmer540
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!0 -
301 Redirect vs Domain Alias
We have hundreds of domains which are either alternate spelling of our primary domain or close keyword names we didn't want our competitor to get before us. The primary domain is running on a dedicated Windows server running IIS6 and set to a static IP. Since it is a static IP and not using host headers any domain pointed to the static IP will immediately show the contents of the site, however the domain will be whatever was typed. Which could be the primary domain or an alias. Two concerns. First, is it possible that Google would penalize us for the alias domains or dilute our primary domain "juice"? Second, we need to properly track traffic from the alias domains. We could make unique content for those performing well and sell or let expire those that are sending no traffic. It's not my goal to use the alias domains to artificially pump up our primary domain. We have them for spelling errors and direct traffic. What is the best practice for handling one or both of these issues?
Technical SEO | | briankb0 -
301 Redirect "wildcard" question
I have been looking at the SEOmoz redirect guide for some advice but I can't seem to find the answer : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection I have lots of URLs from a previous version of a site that look like the following: sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=2d&page=1 sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=3a&page=1 etc etc. I want to write a redirect so whenever a URL with the terms "-c-25.html" is requested it redirects to a specified page, regardless of what comes after the question mark. These URLs were created by our previous ecommerce software. The 'c' is for category, and each page of the cateogry created a different URL. I want to do these so I can rediect all of these URLs to the appropraite new cateogry page in a single redirect. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | craigycraig0