301 or a 404
-
Just had a discussion with a collegue about a page on our own website. We have some cases which are outdated. These pages receive some visitors but they arrive there when they search for the clients brand name, so for us they are irelevant.
What's the best way to handle these kind of pages? Is a 301-redirect to the showcase overview the way to go or do we make it a 404 and include the showcase overview in this 404?
-
There's also a blog post about how to handle expired content at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content
-
I was thinking the same... going for a 301 even if the relevancy isn't 100% correct...
-
Hi,
301: Permanent Redirect, (Response to the crawler)
404: Not found (Response to the user)
Here is a nice Response codes article
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/response-codes-explained-with-pictures
In theory 404 is a safety net for your website when: you delete a page (you shouldn't :), a user types in a incorrect URL ... etc and you don't want the server to display the ugly 404 error message to the client. A lot of 404s to me it shows that the webmaster is not keeping a close eye to his links.
Although 301 redirecting a page that is not relevant anymore is not 100% accurate it's the best solution because:
-
you keep the links juice
-
your showcase page is the most relevant page on the website.
-
you don't lose any direct visits.
Cornel
-
-
Hmmm, these visits don't matter so maybe noindex the page first and then when it drops out just remove it. Then add a 301 to the showcase so that if anyone has it bookmarked for any reason or has linked to it they are not thrown a 404.
Really, it's not a big deal so just do whichever you think works best for the business.
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
-
What should I do with all these 404 pages?
I have a website that Im currently working on that has been fairly dormant for a while and has just been given a face lift and brought back to life. I have some questions below about dealing with 404 pages. In Google WMT/search console there are reports of thousands of 404 pages going back some years. It says there are over 5k in total but I am only able to download 1k or so from WMT it seems. I ran a crawl test with Moz and the report it sent back only had a few hundred 404s in, why is that? Im not sure what to do with all the 404 pages also, I know that both Google and Moz recommend a mixture of leaving some as 404s and redirect others and Id like to know what the community here suggests. The 404s are a mix of the following: Blog posts and articles that have disappeared (some of these have good back-links too) Urls that look like they used to belong to users (the site used to have a forum) which where deleted when the forum was removed, some of them look like they were removed for spam reasons too eg /user/buy-cheap-meds-online and others like that Other urls like this /node/4455 (or some other random number) Im thinking I should permanently redirect the blog posts to the homepage or the blog but Im not sure what to do about all the others? Surely having so many 404s like this is hurting my crawl rate?
Technical SEO | | linklander0 -
Soft 404's on a 301 Redirect...Why?
So we launched a site about a month ago. Our old site had an extensive library of health content that went away with the relaunch. We redirected this entire section of the site to the new education materials, but we've yet to see this reflected in the index or in GWT. In fact, we're getting close to 500 soft 404's in GWT. Our development team confirmed for me that the 301 redirect is configured correctly. Is it just a waiting game at this point or is there something I might be missing? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
404 issues
Hello, Some time ago, something like a month and a half) I have removed all 404 errors from the google index and the webmaster tools have removed them already, however yesterday moz found the same 404 errors that i have removed from indexing (tose pages are deleted or redirected by the site developer). What could be an issue here and why webmaster tools are not registering those 404 errors but moz analytics does. And the other question is if those pages do not exist can i track where the placed? I tried dowloading moz crawl test, but the refering source was not provided. I would highly appreciate anyones help. Thank you
Technical SEO | | rikomuttik0 -
How long should you keep 301 redirects?
Hi, Back in 2009 I decided to update an older site from .htm and .shtml to .php. In order to minimize the impact I would go in every month and do a 301 redirect on the .shtml page to the new .php page. So I have many that range from 2009 through 2010. I had left the old 301's because I felt they would only be used if needed but I would think I should clean up my .htaccess by removing the old 301 redirects if they are not needed. How long should you keep this type of 301 redirect? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Force70 -
301 help, whats the best way
Hi all right now i have 301 redirects setup in my htaccess file i recently redesigned our site so i have been redirecting all the old urls to the new ones. I saw a post about having all your urls the same format, so i updated my htaccess file to redirect all urls from http://www.mysite.com/food to http://www.mysite.com/food/ (added a forward slash). Now on my latest seo crawl i see all my site urls, redirecting to the forward slash url. am i doing this right, thanks will
Technical SEO | | Will_Craig0 -
IIS Work Around 301 Redirects
We are redirecting page-level content (about 500 pages) from several sub domains to our main site. With IIS, It’s my understanding that file locations must match. For example: subdomain/pathA/filename1
Technical SEO | | DigitalMkt
mainsite/pathA/filename1 Since the sub domain files are not on the main site, this means we'd create up to 500 zero byte dummy files on the new server and replicate the sub domain directory structure. With IIS is there a work around for handling page level redirects without duplicating the file location? In the case of white papers, videos and case studies, we'll imlement directory level redirection. Thanks in advance.0 -
404 Error on Spider Emulators
I recently began working at a company called Uncommon Goods. I ran a few different spider emulators on our homepage (uncommongoods.com) and I saw a 404 Error on SEO-browser.com as well as URL errors on Summit Media's emulator and SEOMoz's crawler. It seems there is a serious problem here. How is this affecting our site from an SEO standpoint? What are the repercussions? Also, I know we have a lot of javascript on our homepage..is this causing the 404? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks! -Zack
Technical SEO | | znotes0