404 ? 301 ? What is your opinion ?
-
Hi,
I have a classifieds website and I am wondering about the life of a page with an ad.
An announcement has therefore a limited life, so : Is a 404 pages? a 301 redirect to the section? let the content without redirection?
What is your opinion?
Sorry for my english, i'm french
Thanks.
A.
-
Thanks for your answer.
I'm afraid I have a lot of pages 404.
why not have a 301 redirect to the parent item or to a results page with a message indicating that the announcement sought does not exist anymore?
-
I agree with Dana on the Custom 404 for classifieds. A 301 could confuse people and increase bounce rate since you're not serving them what they thought they were getting. Whereas a 404 makes perfect sense given the transitory nature of a classified ad. Just make sure to let people know the product/ad/listing is no longer available and give them helpful links.
-
In this instance I would create a Custom 404 page that says something like "We are sorry, this product is no longer available. Here are some helpful links to continue searching our site..."
You could also go the route that eBay uses, although it might prove to be a content management nightmare. eBay leaves up closed auctions for a really long time, but adds the message "This auction has ended."
For classified ads, I wouldn't 301 because, depending on what the item is, it could end up being misleading.
Just my thoughts! I'm interested to know what others think.
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
-
Is there any benefit to changing 303 redirects to 301?
A year ago I moved my marketplace website from http to https. I implemented some design changes at the same time, and saw a huge drop in traffic that we have not recovered from. I've been searching for reasons for the organic traffic decline and have noticed that the redirects from http to https URLs are 303 redirects. There's little information available about 303 redirects but most articles say they don't pass link juice. Is it worth changing them to 301 redirects now? Are there risks in making such a change a year later, and is it likely to have any benefits for rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAdeit0 -
301 Redirect from query string to new static page
If i want to create a redirect from a page where the slug ends like this "/?i=4839&mid=1000&id=41537" to a static, more SEO friendly slug like "/contact-us/", will a standard 301 redirect suffice? Thanks, Nails
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matt.nails0 -
301 redirects cross domains
Hi Moz Community. We have a client that has Website A and Website B. Website A is going to be replaced by Website C, a new website and brand. Some products sold on Website A are going to be split out to Website B & C. i.e. Say Website A sells eight products - then four will go to Website B and four to Website C. OUR QUESTION Technically we know we can 301 redirect the Website A products to the relevant Website B & Website C products. 1. Given this convoluted structure, will there be any negative ramifications for SEO? and; 2. Which website would you redirect the homepage to, B or C?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WCR0 -
Opinions on Boilerplate Content
Howdy, Ideally, uniqueness for every page's title, description, and content is desired. But when a site is very, very large, it becomes impossible. I don't believe our site can avoid boilerplate content for title tags or meta-descriptions. We will, however, markup the pages with proper microdata so Google can use this information as they please. What I am curious about is boilerplate content repeated throughout the site for the purpose of helping the user, as well as to tell Google what the page is about (rankings). For instance, this page and this page offer the same type of services, but in different areas. Both pages (and millions of others) offer the exact same paragraph on each page. The information is helpful to the user, but it's definitely duplicate content. All they've changed is the city name. I'm curious, what's making this obvious duplicate content issue okay? The additional unique content throughout (in the form of different businesses), the small, yet obvious differences in on-site content (title tags clearly represent different locations), or just the fact that the site is HUGELY authorative and gets away with it? I'm very curious to hear your opinions on this practice, potential ways to avoid it, and whether or not it's a passable practice for large, but new sites. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirmeliux0 -
Help understanding 301 domain redirect
Can anyone help me understand a specific process of a 301 redirecting a domain. Here is what I would like to know.... When you 301 redirect a site, most if not all the links follow to your new site. But how does this process happen? 1.When Google sees the new domain does it simply apply the backlink profile of the old site to the new one? 2. Does it have to re-crawl all the links one by one and apply them to the new domain? 3. or something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
When is it time to kill 301 redirects
3 months we updated our site design design and as such lots of page urls changed. At the time we 301 redirected about 100 pages. (All pages are on the same domain - 301 redirects like .com/about-us/company to .com/company) Anyhow my question is should I leave these redirects active indefinitely or kill them assuming value has passed through by now? Your Thoughts are welcomed. Thanks, Glen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdvanceSystems0 -
How to decide on which site to 301 redirect
Hi there I'd like your opinions please! My client currently has their website at not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile they also have duplicate sites at: much-better-brand-name-url.it and much-better-brand-name-url.com but both these other sites have only a handful of links in. How important do you think a better brand url is? And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
301 a strong but under-performing landing page to a new domain?
Hi guys, Our website have a very strong landing page (PA 80, more than 1,000 domains linking) but is currently not ranking at all as the targeted terms are dominated by exact match domains. We are thinking of redirecting this particular page to a new partial match domain targeting the same keywords. Is it a good move?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0