Proper way to 404 a page on an Ecommerce Website
-
Hello. I am working on a website that has over 15000 products.
When one of these is no longer available - like it's discontinued or something - the page it's on 302s to a 404 page.
Example - www.greatdomain.com/awesome-widget
Awesome widget is no longer available
302s to
-www.greatdomain.com/404 page.
For the most part, these are not worthy of 301s because of lack of page rank/suitable LPs, but is this the correct way to handle them for search engines? I've seen varying opinions.
Thanks!
-
Hi Nakul,
I appreciate your willingness to help! We actually resolved the issue with help from our developer - standard 404 page - both to viewer and bots - but we've implemented a routine to regularly search for viable redirects to eliminate as many as possible.
On a related note - pretty good post on SEOmoz blog today about this very topic - coincidence?!
-
PM me your website URL with example 404/302 of the discontinued products.
-
Hi Nakul,
These products would be gone forever - like a discontinued item.
The 302 to 404 is my main concern - I agree with each of you that from a UEx perspective redirecting to relevant category pages is ideal.
Is this a standard way of setting this up on a large website (I didn't do it and it seems strange to me). Is there a better way (strictly from the SE perspective?).
Thanks.
-
Agree with Sean. If you were a user and searched for 'Stainless Steel Cookware Set with 4 Saucepans' and that product no longer became available, would you rather land on a 404 page or a 'Cookware Set' or 'Stainless Steel Cookware' type category page?
-
If these product goes away, do you expect them to go away forever or they may come back when they are in stock ? Are these "out of stock" scenarios or is it a gone forever scenario ?
If they are gone forever, a 301 to a category page make sense from usability perspective. If I am a blogger and I blogged about a product of yours, linking to it...I and all my users would prefer/expect the link to be working. If it's not available, out of stock message or if it's gone forever, a 301 to a category page or a plain 404 is better. Why do you have a 302 / Temporary redirect to a 404 page ? Are these really temporarily gone products or permanently gone ?
-
I am not saying this strictly from a link juice but also from a user experience. I would much rather hit another page than hit a 404 with an image.
-
Thanks Sean. I'm not too concerned about 301s in this case - any products that are worth the link would show up in webmaster tools - and search engines expect a certain number of 404s returned. I'm just wondering if this is the correct way to report the 404 error to the engines - with a 302 onto a 404 page? Temporary redirects have me scared. Thanks.
-
Depending how customizable your platform is, you could if discontinued, 301 to next level page in the breadcrumbs. Which would be a category/sub category page
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
-
Page Authority for localized version of website
Hello everyone, I have a case here were I need to decide which steps to take to improve page authority (and thus SEO value) for the German pages on our site. We localized the English version into German at the beginning of 2015. www.memoq.com - English de.memoq.com - German By October 2015 we implemented href tags so that Google would index the pages according to their language. That implementation has been successful. There is one issue though: At that time, all our localized pages had only "1" point for Page Authority ("PA" in the Moz bar). At the beginning we though that this could be due to the fact that localization was done using subdomains (de.memoq.com) rather that subfolders (www.memoq.com/de). However, we decided not to implement changes and to let Google assess the work we had done with the href tags. Its been a while now, and still all our German pages keep having only "1" point for page authority. Plus we have keywords for which we rank in the top 10 in English (US Google Search), but this not the case for the translated version of the keywords for German (Germany Google search). So my question basically is: Is this lack of page authority and SEO value rooted in the fact that we used subdomain instead of subfolder for the URL creation. If so is it likely that Page Authority for German pages and SEO value will increase if I change the structure from subdomains to subfolders? Or is it that the problem in PA is rooted somewhere else that I am missing? I appreciate your feedback.
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Big page of clients - links to individual client pages with light content - not sure if canonical or no-follow - HELP
Not sure what best practice here is: http://www.5wpr.com/clients/ Is this is a situation where I'm best off adding canonical tags back to the main clients page, or to the practice area each client falls under? No-following all these links and adding canonical? No-follow/No-index all client pages? need some advice here...
Technical SEO | | simplycary0 -
50,000 pages or a page with parameters
I have a site with about 12k pages on a topic... each of these pages could use another several pages to go into deeper detail about the topic. So, I am wondering, for SEO purposes would it be better to have something like 50,000 new pages for each sub topic or have one page that I would pass parameters to and the page would be built on the fly in code behind. The drawback to the one page with parameters is that the URL would be static but the effort to implement would be minimal. I am also not sure how google would index a single page with parameters. The drawback to the 50k pages model is the dev effort and possibly committed some faux pas by unleashing so many links to my internal pages. I might also have to mix aspx with html because my project can't be that large. Anyone here ever have this sort of choice to make? Is there a third way I am not considering?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Container Page/Content Page Duplicate Content
My client has a container page on their website, they are using SiteFinity, so it is called a "group page", in which individual pages appear and can be scrolled through. When link are followed, they first lead to the group page URL, in which the first content page is shown. However, when navigating through the content pages, the URL changes. When navigating BACK to the first content page, the URL is that for the content page, but it appears to indexers as a duplicate of the group page, that is, the URL that appeared when first linking to the group page. The client updates this on the regular, so I need to find a solution that will allow them to add more pages, the new one always becoming the top page, without requiring extra coding. For instance, I had considered integrating REL=NEXT and REL=PREV, but they aren't going to keep that up to date.
Technical SEO | | SpokeHQ1 -
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 -
ECommerce site - Duplicate pages problem.
We have an eCommerce site with multiple products being displayed on a number of pages. We use rel="next" and rel="prev" and have a display ALL which I understand Google should automatically be able to find. Should we also being using a Canonical tag as well to tell google to give authority to the first page or the All Pages. Or was the use of the next and prev rel tags that we currently do adequate. We currently display 20 products per page, we were thinking of increasing this to make fewer pages but they would be better as this which would make some later product pages redundant . If we add 301 redirects on the redundant pages, does anyone know of the sort of impact this might cause to traffic and seo ?. General thoughts if anyone has similar problems welcome
Technical SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Website Page Structuring and URL re writing - need helpful resources
Hello, I am not technically very sound and I need some good articles that teach me how to think about and go about website pages structuring and url rewriting that is seo friendly. I will be most obliged if some of you great seomoz-ers can pitch in with help. Regards, Talha ZigZag Solutions
Technical SEO | | TopGearMedia0 -
404 errors on a 301'd page
I current have a site that when run though a site map tool (screaming frog or xenu) returns a 404 error on a number of pages The pages are indexed in Google and when visited they do 301 to the correct page? why would the sitemap tool be giving me a different result? is it not reading the page correctly?
Technical SEO | | EAOM0