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
-
How to get google to forget my old but still working page and list my new fully optimized page for a keyword?
Hi There! (i am beginner in seo) I have dynamic and static pages on our site. I created a static page for a specific keyword. Fully optimized it, (h1, alt, metas, etc.....maybe too optimized). My problem is that this page is alive for weeks, checked it in GWT and it is in robots.txt, google sees it, and indexed it. BUT whenewer i do a search for that keyword, we still appear with the dynamically created link in the google listings. How could i "redirect" google, if sy make a search for that keyword than shows our optimized page? Is there a tool for that? I cant delete the dynamic page... Any ideas? Thx Andrew
Technical SEO | | Neckermann0 -
Titling Category Pages Like You Would a Blog Page?
So, with our 600 or so category pages, I was curious... on each of these category pages we show the top 12 products for that category. In trying to increase click through rate, I wonder if it would be prudent to use some of the strategies I see used for Blog posts with thee category pages. i.e. Instead of Category Name - Website Name How about: Top 12 Kitty Litters We Carry - View the Best and the Rest! Or something like that. And then in the description, I could put, "Number 8 made my jaw drop!!!" (Ok, kidding about that one...) But serious about the initial question... Thanks! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Can up a page
I do my best to optimize the on-page parameters for my page www.lkeria.com/AADL-logement-Algerie.php for the kw "aadl" but i can't understand what Ii'm doing wrong (i desapear 2 mounths ago). The page is optimize (title, description, h1, h2 etc.) few links with different ancers, but google put a spamy site www[dot]aadl[dot]biz in top 3 ratheer my page. Can you give me some advice to fix this issue? What I am doing wrong? Tanks in advance
Technical SEO | | lkeria0 -
404's in WMT are old pages and referrer links no longer linking to them.
Within the last 6 days, Google Webmaster Tools has shown a jump in 404's - around 7000. The 404 pages are from our old browse from an old platform, we no longer use them or link to them. I don't know how Google is finding these pages, when I check the referrer links, they are either 404's themselves or the page exists but the link to the 404 in question is not on the page or in the source code. The sitemap is also often referenced as a referrer but these links are definitely not in our sitemap and haven't been for some time. So it looks to me like the referrer data is outdated. Is that possible? But somehow these pages are still being found, any ideas on how I can diagnose the problem and find out how google is finding them?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
Best way to manage SEO for a massive events listing website.
I run a website that tracks entertainment for the entire state of South Dakota. While I've made some fantastic strides in gaining traffic, I feel lost on how to manage all those entries in an SEO friendly manner. I have a TON of errors showing on my crawl diagnostics and I just don't know what to do. The nature of the website is such that there are going to be duplications all over the place. I know that I can help some of this by getting my canonical links setup properly (that's coming in my next version of the site's theme), but what else should I do to make those event listings friendly for the SE's?? http://www.entertainsd.com
Technical SEO | | jcherland0 -
How do i raise my product pages authority - ecommerce
hi, just started here and going through my website to make sure everything is fine and relevant to the search terms i am aiming for. However i notice a lot of my pages have an authority of 1 which clearly isnt acceptable! how do i best go to modify this so the authority is risen?
Technical SEO | | GarethEJones0 -
Does google like Category pages or pages with lots of Products on them?
We are having an issue with getting Google to rank the page we want. To have this page http://www.jakewilson.com/c/52/-/346/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires rank for the key word Cruiser Motorcycle Tires; however, this page http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/752/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires is ranking instead and it has less links and page authority according to site explorer and it is farther down in the hierarchy. I am wondering if google just likes pages that have actual products on them instead of a page leading to the page with all the products. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Translating Page Titles & Page Descriptions
I am working on a site that will be published in the original English, with localized versions in French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. All the versions will use the English information architecture. As part of the process, we will be translating the page the titles and page descriptions. Translation quality will be outstanding. The client is a translation company. Each version will get at least four pairs of eyes including expert translators, editors, QA experts and proofreaders. My question is what special SEO instructions should be issued to translators re: the page titles and page descriptions. (We have to presume the translators know nothing about SEO.) I was thinking of: stick to the character counts for titles and descriptions make sure the title and description work together avoid over repetition of keywords page titles (over-optimization peril) think of the descriptions as marketing copy try to repeat some title phrases in the description (to get the bolding and promote click though) That's the micro stuff. The macro stuff: We haven't done extensive keyword research for the other languages. Most of the clients are in the US. The other language versions are more a demo of translation ability than looking for clients elsewhere. Are we missing something big here?
Technical SEO | | DanielFreedman0