What should I do with a large number of 'pages not found'?
-
One of my client sites lists millions of products and 100s or 1000s are de-listed from their inventory each month and removed from the site (no longer for sale). What is the best way to handle these pages/URLs from an SEO perspective? There is no place to use a 301.
1. Should we implement 404s for each one and put up with the growing number of 'pages not found' shown in Webmaster Tools?
2. Should we add them to the Robots.txt file?
3. Should we add 'nofollow' into all these pages?
Or is there a better solution?
Would love some help with this!
-
I would leave the pages up but mark them as "no follow". When I worked in eCommerce, this was a great tactic. For UX purposes, you could try to steer people to similar-products, but keep the originating page as "no follow" or "no index".
-
Thanks Jane and Lesley for your responses. Great ideas from you both. I think I'll keep the pages but change the content/buying options, as you've both suggested.
I had considered 410s and might fall back on this for historical URLs in the instance that we can no longer retrieve the content.
-
I always take notes from giants on how to handle things like this. Amazon is the giant in this arena, what do they do? They do not disable the product, they leave it on the site as unavailable. I would do the same thing personally. What platform are you using, does it have a suggested products module / plugin? If so, it can be modified to be more promient on pages that are disabled from selling. But I would keep the page and keep the authority of the page.
If you 301 it to another product, the search satisfaction level goes down and your bounce rate will rise. I would be careful with this, because Google wants to serve results that are relevant and what people are looking for.
The other option I would give is to return a 410 status code to get them de-indexed.
-
Hi Claire,
If you really can't 301, consider serving a page providing alternative products, a search function and an explanation of why the page's former content is no longer available. Many estate websites are quite good at this. Using real estate as an example, some maintain the URLs of properties that regularly go on the market (big city apartments, for example) but grey out the information to show a user that the property is not currently for lease. Other URLs will show properties in the former listing's post code.
Your robots.txt file is going to get out of control if you are having to add millions of pages to it on a regular basis, so I would personally not pursue that route.
-
Why aren't 301s an option?
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
-
Purchased domain with links - redirect page by page or entire domain?
Hi, I purchased an old domain with a lot of links that I'm redirecting to my site. I want all of their links to redirect to the same page on my site so I can approach this two different ways: Entire site
Technical SEO | | ninel_P
1.) RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com or Page by page
2). Redirect 301 /retiredpage.html http://www.xyz.com/newpage.html Is there a better option I should go with in regards to SEO effectiveness? Thanks in advance!0 -
Duplicate page issue
Hi, i have a serious duplicate page issue and not sure how it happened and i am not sure if anyone will be able to help as my site was built in joomla, it has been done through k2, i have never come across this issue before i am seem to have lots of duplicate pages under author names, example http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker this page is showing the full articles which is not great for seo and it is also showing that there are hundreds more articles at the bottom on the semoz tool i am using, it is showing these as duplicates although there are hundreds of them and it is causing google to see lots of duplicate pages. Diane Walker
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-2 5 1 0
Diane Walker
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-210 1 1 0
Diane Walker
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-297 1 1 0
Diane Walker
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-3 5 1 0
Diane Walker can anyone please help me to sort this important issue out.0 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Duplicate pages
Hi Can anyone tell me why SEO MOZ thinks these paes are duplicates when they're clearly not? Thanks very much Kate http://www.katetooncopywriter.com.au/how-to-be-a-freelance-copywriter/picture-1-58/ http://www.katetooncopywriter.com.au/portfolio/clients/other/ http://www.katetooncopywriter.com.au/portfolio/clients/travel/ http://www.katetooncopywriter.com.au/webservices/what-i-do/blog-copywriter/
Technical SEO | | ToonyWoony0 -
Index page
To the SEO experts, this may well seem a silly question, so I apologies in advance as I try not to ask questions that I probably know the answer for already, but clarity is my goal I have numerous sites ,as standard practice, through the .htaccess I will always set up non www to www, and redirect the index page to www.mysite.com. All straight forward, have never questioned this practice, always been advised its the ebst practice to avoid duplicate content. Now, today, I was looking at a CMS service for a customer for their website, the website is already built and its a static website, so the CMS integration was going to mean a full rewrite of the website. Speaking to a friend on another forum, he told me about a service called simple CMS, had a look, looks perfect for the customer ... Went to set it up on the clients site and here is the problem. For the CMS software to work, it MUST access the index page, because my index page is redirected to www.mysite.com , it wont work as it cant find the index page (obviously) I questioned this with the software company, they inform me that it must access the index page, I have explained that it wont be able to and why (cause I have my index page redirected to avoid duplicate content) To my astonishment, the person there told me that duplicate content is a huge no no with Google (that's not the astonishing part) but its not relevant to the index and non index page of a website. This goes against everything I thought I knew ... The person also reassured me that they have worked within the SEO area for 10 years. As I am a subscriber to SEO MOZ and no one here has anything to gain but offering advice, is this true ? Will it not be an issue for duplicate content to show both a index page and non index page ?, will search engines not view this as duplicate content ? Or is this SEO expert talking bull, which I suspect, but cannot be sure. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, it would make my life a lot easier for the customer to use this CMS software, but I would do it at the risk of tarnishing the work they and I have done on their ranking status Many thanks in advance John
Technical SEO | | Johnny4B0 -
Diagnostic says too many links on a page and most of the pages are from blog entries. Are tags considered links? How do I decrease links?
I just ran my first diagnostic on my site and the results came back were negative in the area of too many links one a page. There were also quite a few 404 errors. What is the best way to fix these problems? Most of the pages with too many links are from blog posts, are the tags counted as well and is this the reason for too many links?
Technical SEO | | Newport10300 -
Renaming of pages
About 2 months ago one of our clients renamed a section of his website. The worst part is that the URLs of the page also changed. New page: http://www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmo Old page: http://www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmoe The problem now is that the new page get absolutely no page-rank transfered from the old page. It also get no mozrank at all. Also if I try to find it in the Open Site Explorer it can not be found.The old page can, but not the new one. We have updated the sitemap.xml and also done proper 301 redirect for the pages since about 2 months. Any ideas here? This page was a very important page in terms of traffic so very much thankful for any input. Have a great day Fredrik
Technical SEO | | Resultify0 -
Ignore url parameters without the 'parameter=' ?
We are working on an ecommerce site that sorts out the products by color and size but doesn't use the sortby= but uses sortby/. Can we tell Google to ignore the sortby/ parameter in Webmaster Tools even though it is not followed by an = sign? For example: www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/size-m www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/color-black Can we tell WMT to ignore the 'shopby/' parameter so that only the tshirts page will be indexed? Or does the shopby have to be set up as 'shopby=' ? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0
