What to use instead of a 404
-
Hey there Mozzers,
What would be preferable to use instead of a 404 on a ecommerce website.
Can I use a 301 redirection to the main category of the product? So for example if I have a t-shirt that is not available anymore can I use a 301 to redirect the traffic to the clothing category?
-
Hi,
It's not about 'using 404 pages'. It's about removing the occurence of a 404 page when a product isn't available...
So the answer is yes. It's fine to redirect what was a product page to the main relevant category page if that product is no longer available and you don't plan on restocking in the future.
In fact it's recommended if you want to preserve a large percentage of the link equity the original page has built up, and hopefully provide a good user experience by allowing customers to find alternative products.
The only issue is if you have thousands of products being discontinued, then the amount of 301s can affect the speed of your website. But I've managed redirects for websites with 100s of thousands of products, and 10s of thousands of error pages without any issue.
I'd echo Yossi in saying that it may be worth creating a custom 404 Error Page which helps your users if they encounter it, and also improves your branding - with most eCommerce sites with large inventories, it's inevitable error pages will crop up despite your best efforts.
And I'd echo Nitin in saying that if you might get the product back again, you're better leaving the pages on the site and allowing customers to register their interest when it reappears...
-
Hi AngeloS,
I agree with Yossi that soft 404 is not a good practice if the product isn't available.
But here, you're talking about the case where your product isn't available anymore, which is not the 404 case clearly. 404 means, resource not found on the website. So, your page is not 404 semantically as page it still there with a different availability status.
Here comes my recommendations on this:
- If the "product" is temporarily unavailable, you can show an appropriate message with 200 http status. Additionally, for better UX, you can show a recommendation bar showing other related products and a notify-me option where you can get user's email id on which you can send a notification mail as soon as this product gets back in stock.
- If the "product" is permanently discontinued and you want to get rid of that page altogether, you can probably show 200 http status with an appropriate message and have a noindex tag on these pages, or you can start showing 410 http status if you want to convey a message to bots that your "page" won't come back ever.
You can read more about HTTP status codes here.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi..
Google guidelines recommends that If a page does not exist, you should state that clearly to the user and return a 404 page.
What you really need to do is to set up a very clever 404 page so you will not loose the client. There are many ecommerce sites that have super clever 404 pages where users are able to see similar items that are in stock, make a search or go to different page.. Just be creative and research what works for your competitors.Using 301 to 404 pages is a bad practice in general..
Good luck
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
-
Error 404 Search Console
Hi all, We have a number of 404 https status listed in Search Console even treated, not decrease. What happened: We launched a website with the urls www.meusite.com/url-abc. We launched these urls sitemap. Google has indexed. ... For some reason, the urls were changed four days later by some developer in my equipe. So I asked the redirection of URLs "old" already indexed to the new (of: / url-abc to / url-xyz) all correspondingly. I submit the sitemap with new urls. We fixed the internal links. And than marked as fixed in the Search Console. But it does not work! Has anyone had a similar experience? Thanks for any advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mobic0 -
Will using my Homepage as a KW target improve my Inner page Ranking?
Hello your help please! I have 2 KWs that i have targeted Inner pages for and they have got them to page 2 in SERPs, but now its getting difficult to move them up to page 1. Will targeting the home page with a higher authority, for the same terms, help or hinder the inner pages current position? Many Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Using href lang tag for multi-regional targeting on the same page
Hi, I have the site au.example.com and I ranked on google AustraliaI would like to be ranked also in Google New Zeland for the same page (au.example.com) Because they are geographically & culturally close Can I place href lang tag for both countries and present the same page The code should look like: OR should i have create a different page for New Zealand (for eample: http://au.example.com/EN-NZ) And the code will look like: What will work better or there is other solution? Hope I’m clear.. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kung_fu_Panda0 -
Do 410 show in the 404 not found section in Google Webmaster Tools?
Question: Do 410 show in the 404 not found section in Google Webmaster Tools? Specific situation: We got rid of an entire subdomain except for a few pages that we 301'd to relevant content on our main domain. The rest return a 404 not found. These show up in our google webmaster tools as crawl errors. I was wondering since 410 is a content gone error and we intentionally want this content gone, if we switch it to 410, does Google still report it as a 404 error? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
What Wordpress Update Services Should You Be Using on Your Wordpress Blog?
I have been told that pingomatic.com is all that you need however yesterday I went to a conference and others were recommending to have a good list of pinging services to cover all your bases Here are 4 that have been recommended: pingomatic technorati blogsearch.google.com feedburner Any others that should be included on this list? My goal is not to spam these ping lists however want to make sure my content is getting indexed quickly
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Internal linking using exact keywords Bad – Post Panda
Internal linking using exact keywords Bad – Post Panda Any tips for internal linking ,how can we target landing pages to rank well using internal linking. Use of Keywords in within site links, is it bad? Are footer links bad? Use of Siloing artichture bad or good? What a best linking model for Ecommerce Site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
Do I use a .org or .co.uk domain to help UK rankings?
Hi Guys, I own to good domains one with a .ORG and the other .CO.UK Can anyone advise which one is best to use to help UK rankings? Or does it not make much difference?? Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
301 to 404
Hello Everybody, I've got a technical question about server responses. Imagine this scenario: www.domain.com/not-existing-page/ --> 404 & domain.com/not-existing-page/ --> www.domain.com/not-existing-page/ --> 404 I use Wordpress for my websites and I can't seem to be able to configure it (or the server where I have total control) to stop it doing this. Ideally, a non-existent url should return 404 instantly, not first redirect to the "corect" url and then return 404. Anyone experiencing this and can help? Here's a neat tool that allows you to quickly check server response codes - for those of you who are new to this: http://responsetester.appspot.com/ Much appreciated! Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pwpaneuro1