Redirects (301/302) versus errors (404)
-
I am not able to convincingly decide between using redirects versus using 404 errors. People are giving varied opinions. Here are my cases
1. Coding errors - we put out a bad link
a. Some people are saying redirect to home page; the user at least has something to do PLUS more importantly it does NOT hurt your SEO ranking.
b. Counter - the page ain't there. Return 404
2. Product removed - link1 to product 1 was out there. We removed product1; so link1 is also gone. It is either lying in people's bookmarks, OR because of coding errors we left it hanging out at some places on our site.
-
To add to what George says....
Google often tries to crawl pages that don't exist - simply to make sure they aren't missing anything on your site. When a page is clearly broken, you want to communicate this to Google by serving a 404 (but you can make it a friendly 404)
Here's what Googler John Mueller has to say:
What about the funky URLs that are “clearly broken?” When our algorithms like your site, they may try to find more great content on it, for example by trying to discover new URLs in JavaScript. If we try those “URLs” and find a 404, that’s great and expected. We just don’t want to miss anything important (insert overly-attached Googlebot meme here)."
Google expects to find 404s on your site. When they don't find 404s for links that should be broken, this sends confusing signals and could cause crawl problems.
I recommend reading this entire article - it's one of the most helpful I've ever read on the subject: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ch/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html
As for expired products - as George said it's best to 301 them, usually to a category level page.
-
I have similar issue, Recently Google blocked my blog for Google Adsense then after removing two to five articles, now they are online.
But now i get more 404 error for that page. I removed from the blog, I drafted them, in case if google not allowed the ads, i will re-publish it.
Now i have to remove the post link from the search results and from cPanel i can redirect to the home page
Their Page Authority is 25-30 respectively ! Plz advice me !
-
Richard and Moosa are right, use a friendly 404 page to help your users when they reach a page that can no longer be found. Simply redirecting them to the home page doesn't fix the issue of the missing page. Here's an old, but relevant, post on the subject: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/personalizing-your-404-error-pages.
For your second issue, if you've permanently moved to a new product page, you should certainly 301 redirect to not only pass on all the link juice from the old page, but also to provide the best user experience for your customers - they were looking for the product so give them the new improved page :).
-
Ok, here is the easiest way to understand this (As far as I think)!
- 404: This is the status code that browser give when the page on the website is not available.
- 302: This is the status code of the page if it is temporary redirected to some new page. This simply means that old page will not pass the link juice to the new page but when user reach to this URL will drive them to a new location.
- 301: This is the status code which does almost the same work as 302 but in that case old URL passes its link juice as well. This is commonly known as permanent redirection.
Websites usually should not use 404 as this disturbs the user experience of the page but upon requirement and keeping scenarios in mind use of 301 or 302 is always an intelligent approach.
-
Hi For 1: I would suggest a custom friendly 404 page. This means the user sees a page saying something like 'Sorry the product / page you were after no longer exists. Here are some useful options ( then list a handful of popular page links). You could even includes a site search or your tel number / email to contact. This means the user knows what has hppened, had somewhere useful to go but it returns a 404. For 2: If the page is being moved - use a 301 redirect on the existing page. If you are simply not selling that product anymore than do a 404 as above. In both cases monitor your GA and GWT for 404s and fix where applicable. All the best. Richard
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
-
Having a Subfolder/Subdirectory With a Different Design Than the Root Domain
Hi Everyone, I was wondering what Google thinks about having a subfolder/subdirectory with a different design than the root domain. So let's say we have MacroCorp Inc. which has been around for decades. MacroCorp has tens of thousands of backlinks and a couple thousand referring domains from quality sites in its industry and news sites. MacroCorp Inc. spins off one of its products into a new company called MicroCorp Inc., which makes CoolProduct. The new website for this company is CoolProduct.MacroCorp.com (a subdomain) which has very few backlinks and referring domains. To help MicroCorp rank better, both companies agree to place the MicroCorp content at MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/. The root domain (MacroCorp.com) links to the subfolder from its navigation and MicroCorp does the same, but the MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/ subfolder has an entirely different design than the root domain. Will MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/ be crawled, indexed, and rank better as both companies think it would? Or would Google still treat the subfolder like a subdomain or even a separate root domain in this case? Are there any studies, documentation, or links to good or bad examples of this practice? When LinkedIn purchased Lynda.com, for instance, what if they kept the https://www.lynda.com/ design as is and placed it at https://www.linkedin.com/learning/. Would the pre-purchase (yellow/black design) https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ rank any worse than it does now with the root domain (LinkedIn) aligned design? Thanks! Andy
Web Design | | AndyRCWRCM1 -
Looking to remove SSL because it is causing very slow website download speeds. Does WP have a plugin that redirects SSL urls to non SSL urls?
After some extended debate with our web development team we are considering dropping the SSL from our website because it is adding almost 2 additional seconds to our download speeds. We know there is a SEO boost from having a SSL but we believe the extended download speeds maybe outweighing the benefit. However we are concerned about the SEO implications of having no method possible of redirect SSL to non SSL webpages. Does anybody know of a Wordpress Plugin that can force redirect SSL urls to non SSL urls?
Web Design | | RosemaryB0 -
Multiple websites for different service areas/business functions?
I'm wondering what the implications are for having multiple domains for different service areas of a company? I realize having multiple domains for one company can be troublesome because of the possibility of duplicate content, keyword cannibalization, and linkbuilding to multiple domains. But when the domains are for very different service offerings/unique business functions that each serve their own purpose (and have different positionings), is there a downside to having more than one domain? Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Web Design | | KevinBloom0 -
Redirecting Images
Hi, I'm wondering how important it is when relaunching a site on a new platform (switching to Drupal) to serve up images from the same file paths in order to ensure consistency during the changeover. I've tried to keep the questions straightforward so that this post can be useful to people in a similar situation in future: How much difference do the file paths make to SEO? Does Google care or even notice if the image file paths change? Is it worth forcing Drupal to mimic our old file paths for the sake of consistency with the old site in order to maintain rankings OR do we take the opportunity to redesign our file paths for better SEO? Any help would be much appreciated 🙂
Web Design | | Tinhat0 -
Redirecting duplicate pages
For whatever reason, X-cart creates duplicates of our categories and articles so that we have URLs like this www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars
Web Design | | k9byron
www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/ or http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar
http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar/ now our SEO guy says that we dont have to redirect these because google is "smart enough" to know they are the same, and that we should "leave it as-is". However, everything I have read online says that google sees this as dupe content and that we should redirect to one or the other / or no /, depending on which most of our internal links already point to, which is with a slash. What should we do? Redirect or leave it as is? Thanks!0 -
RSS Submissions Positive/Negative/Neutral Impact...
We are looking to push our site content and blog content out to the masses... There are several sites and services that accept RSS feeds or submit RSS feeds to 50+ RSS sites. Have you seen an positive or negative impact of submitting feeds to these RSS directories? I am primarily looking at this for getting or content out and builing inbound links... Any thoughts or feedback would be appreciated... C
Web Design | | hireawizseo0 -
Link Pages/Directory
Hello, What is best practise for dealing with alot of links. I was thinking of breaking them download to alphabet pages i.e. all A on one page etc... BUT should I then make the links clickable on this list OR that they load to a sub company page which has a clickable link to there website.
Web Design | | JohnW-UK0 -
Auto-Generated META tag on 404 Page
I'm currently creating a 404 error page for my site and I noticed that a similar site uses some sort of code to automatically generate a meta title. Is this useful? For instance type in electrolux.com/john This page does not exist but in the title you'll see John | Electrolux How can i do this on my site?
Web Design | | evacuumstoreSEO0