Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What should happen to expired real estate listings?
-
For a real estate website, when a house is sold or taken off of the market. What should happen to the listing? 301 redirect it to the grouping (such as zip code or city) which that listing resides in? 404 it?
-
Do you let the old URLs 404 or do you redirect them?
-
So after a year or two there would be thousands of 301 redirects - would you eventually delete these after a year or two?
-
I'd usually say redirect it to a category page (zip code or city) straight away but from a users point of view it may not be the best thing to do. Maybe leave the page up with a sold sign and then have a "you may also like" section underneath so they know the house is gone but there are some other options, probably the best for UX. After a few weeks, I'd then 301 it to a category page.
-
What I do (I also work on a real estate website):
Short-term (maybe one or two weeks): Leave as is but have a "sold" banner over the listing.
Afterwards: Delete it.
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
-
Conditional Noindex for Dynamic Listing Pages?
Hi, We have dynamic listing pages that are sometimes populated and sometimes not populated. They are clinical trial results pages for disease types, some of which don't always have trials open. This means that sometimes the CMS produces a blank page -- pages that are then flagged as thin content. We're considering implementing a conditional noindex -- where the page is indexed only if there are results. However, I'm concerned that this will be confusing to Google and send a negative ranking signal. Any advice would be super helpful. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
SEO on Jobs sites: how to deal with expired listings with "Google for Jobs" around
Dear community, When dealing with expired job offers on jobs sites from a SEO perspective, most practitioners recommend to implement 301 redirects to category pages in order to keep the positive ranking signals of incoming links. Is it necessary to rethink this recommendation with "Google for Jobs" is around? Google's recommendations on how to handle expired job postings does not include 301 redirects. "To remove a job posting that is no longer available: Remove the job posting from your sitemap. Do one of the following: Note: Do NOT just add a message to the page indicating that the job has expired without also doing one of the following actions to remove the job posting from your sitemap. Remove the JobPosting markup from the page. Remove the page entirely (so that requesting it returns a 404 status code). Add a noindex meta tag to the page." Will implementing 301 redirects the chances to appear in "Google for Jobs"? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grnjbs07175 -
Should I use the on classified listing pages that have expired?
We have went back and forth on this and wanted to get some outside input. I work for an online listing website that has classified ads on it. These ads are generated by companies on our site advertising weekend events around the country. We have about 10,000 companies that use our service to generate their online ads. This means that we have thousands of pages being created each week. The ads have lots of content: pictures, sale descriptions, and company information. After the ads have expired, and the sale is no longer happening, we are currently placing the in the heads of each page. The content is not relative anymore since the ad has ended. The only value the content offers a searcher is the images (there are millions on expired ads) and the descriptions of the items for sale. We currently are the leader in our industry and control most of the top spots on Google for our keywords. We have been worried about cluttering up the search results with pages of ads that are expired. In our Moz account right now we currently have over 28k crawler warnings alerting us to the being in the page heads of the expired ads. Seeing those warnings have made us nervous and second guessing what we are doing. Does anybody have any thoughts on this? Should we continue with placing the in the heads of the expired ads, or should we be allowing search engines to index the old pages. I have seen websites with discontinued products keeping the products around so that individuals can look up past information. This is the closest thing have seen to our situation. Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated! -Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mellison0 -
404 or 410 status code after deleting a real estate listing
Hi there, We manage a website which generates an overview and detailpages of listings for several real estate agents. When these listings have been sold, they are removed from the overview and pages. These listings appear as not found in the crawl error overview in Google Search Console. These pages appear as 404's, would changing this to 410's solve this problem? And if not, what fix could take care of this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MartijntenCaat0 -
How to outrank a directory listing with high DA but low PA?
My site is at 4th place, 3 places above it is a gumtree (similar to yell, yelp) listing. How can you figure out how difficult it would be outrank those pages? I mean obviously the pages would have low PA and they are top based on the high DA of the site. This also seems to go back to keyword research and difficulty, when I'm doing keyword research and I see a wikipedia site in top 5 rank, or a yell.com or perhaps an article in forbes.com outranks your site. Typically the problem seems to be Google giving a lot of credit to these pages rankings based on the high DA rather than PA of the pages. How would you gauge the difficulty of that keyword then if the competition are pages with very high DA which is impossible to compete with but low PA? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | magusara2 -
Is there a way to get a list of Total Indexed pages from Google Webmaster Tools?
I'm doing a detailed analysis of how Google sees and indexes our website and we have found that there are 240,256 pages in the index which is way too many. It's an e-commerce site that needs some tidying up. I'm working with an SEO specialist to set up URL parameters and put information in to the robots.txt file so the excess pages aren't indexed (we shouldn't have any more than around 3,00 - 4,000 pages) but we're struggling to find a way to get a list of these 240,256 pages as it would be helpful information in deciding what to put in the robots.txt file and which URL's we should ask Google to remove. Is there a way to get a list of the URL's indexed? We can't find it in the Google Webmaster Tools.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sparrowdog0 -
How to perform Local SEO for sites like Angies List/Task Rabbit or Craigslist
I have a new SEO client that has a business model similar to Criagslist and Angies List or Task Rabbit, Where they offer local based services nationwide. My first thought was Local link building and citation building etc. But the issue is they are a purely online service company and they don't have a phyiscal address in every city/state they will be offering their services in. What is the best course of action for providing SEO services for this type of business model. I am pretty much at a stand still on how to rank them locally for the areas they provide services in. it's a business model that involves local businesses and customers looking for services from those local businesses.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VITALBGS0 -
How do I list the subdomains of a domain?
Hi Mozers, I am trying to find what subdomains are currently active on a particular domain. Is there a way to get a list of this information? The only way I could think of doing it is to run a google search on; site:example.com -site:www.example.com The only issues with this approach is that a majority of the indexed pages exist on the non-www domain and I still have thousands of pages in the results (mainly from the non-www). Is there another way to do it in Google? OR is there a server admin online tool that will tell me this information? Cheers, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlaidler0