301, 302, 404 or 410
-
Hello,
We have an ecommerce site and it's very normal for products to be discontinued by the manufacturer. We used to leave the pages up to keep the content and link equity. Now we feel this is misleading for the customer and we have started to remove pages for discontinued items. Customers trying to reach these pages get a nice Product Not Found page with an explanation and links to categories. The shopping cart sends a 302 code.
Google Webmaster Tools was complaining about "soft 404's" and apparently didn't like this. We tried changing to a 404 return code but couldn't get the nice Product Not Found page to display. Plus, GWT and SEOmoz started to complain about 404 errors.
I think we've reached a solution where we can send a 301 and still display the desired Product Not Found page. This might be the best solution. We'll see if we get errors from SEOmoz or GWT. However, a 410 return code would probably be most correct but we'd like to salvage any link equity we can but we really want to be "good citizens" and do things right.
Should we really be sending a 410 in this case even if we lose seo equity or are we OK with the 301 and the nice information page?
Thanks,
Tom
-
I agree with David and Moosa.
Redirect to the category page if it is genuinely useful for your visitor. So in some cases you might want to put user experience above retaining link juice within that category and either redirect elsewhere or create a custom page.
-
The best idea is to 301 to removed product’s category page or a custom page that explains why the page does not exist anymore what are the ideal paces on the website to go and find similar products....
-
I agree with David
-
410 will kill the link equity. In cases similar to yours, I have implemented a 301 to the category page of the product removed. This gives users products similar to the one they were looking for, and retains link equity.
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
-
Moving content form Non-performing site to performing site - wihtout 301 Redirection
I have 2 different websites: one have good amount of traffic and another have No Traffic at all. I have a website that has lots of valuable content But no traffic. And I want to move the content of non-performing site to performing site. (Don't want to redirect) My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to "noindex" on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the performing domain to be indexed again. So, I was wondering If it will create any copied content issue or not? What should i have to take care of when I am going to move content from one site to another?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
Should I 301 redirect my old site are just add a link to my new site
I used to offer design and web services on a site that is current blank (no content, no links). My questions is should I add a little bit of content, maybe a brief explanation with a link to my new site. Or should I just add 301 redirect. This is purely a question of what is better for SEO and ranking for my new site (not a branding question).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tyrell0 -
301 domain name URL variants for canonicalization question in htaccess?
#1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xyz.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com/$1 [L,R=301] What I want to do here is to redirect URLs that have omitted the “www.” prefix to the full “www.xyz.com” home page URL. That means the home page URL http://xyz.com will not resolve on its own, but instead will redirect to http://www.xyz.com (without trailing slash). #2 RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*(default|index).(html|php|htm)\ HTTP/ [NC] RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)(default|main|index).(html|php|htm)$ http://www.xyz.com/$1 [L,R=301] What I want to do here is to ensure that any home page URL that includes several versions of explicit page name references, such as default.htm or index.html, will be redirected to the canonical home page URL, http://www.xyz.com (without trailing slash). Are the rewrite rules correct? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Do I need to undo a 301 redirect to dissavow links from the source domain?
A client came to me after being hit by Penguin and had already performed a 301 redirect from site A to Site B. Site B was subsequently hit by the penalty a number of weeks later and we are planing on performing link removal for Site A. Only the webmaster tools account for Site B exists, none is still available for site A. I assume that I cannot dissavow links to site A from Site B's webmaster tool account (even though website A's links show up in the GWT account). So do I need to undo the 301 and then create a new GWT account for site A in order to disavow the links pointing to site A, or can I submit from Site B's GWT account since they are 301'd to site B? Thanks! Chris [edited for formatting]
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOdub0 -
How does the Google Treat 301 Redirects?
Hi, My website was one of many that dropped in rankings this last Friday, The company that i outsourced my SEO 4 months ago did a bad job. Now i'm doing everything my self to recover, so i was thinking getting a new hosting, duplicate the website with a same content (i have original quality content) and 301 my old domain to new one? How long can it last with Google? Can penalties be passed via 301 redirects ? Looking forward to your help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mezozcorp0 -
Will implementing 301's on an existing domain impact massively on rankings?
Hi Guys,I have a new SEO client who only has the non-www domain setup for GWT and I am wondering if implementing a 301 for www will have a massive negative impact on rankings. I know a percentage of link juice and PageRank will be affected. So my question is: If I implement the 301 should I brace myself for a fall in rankings. Should I use a 301 instead to maintain link juice and PageRank? Is it good practice to forward to www? Or could I leave the non www in place and have the www redirect to it to maintain the data? Dave
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | icanseeu0 -
Site architecture change - +30,000 404's in GWT
So recently we decided to change the URL structure of our online e-commerce catalogue - to make it easier to maintain in the future. But since the change, we have (partially expected) +30K 404's in GWT - when we did the change, I was doing 301 redirects from our Apache server logs but it's just escalated. Should I be concerned of "plugging" these 404's, by either removing them via URL removal tool or carry on doing 301 redirections? It's quite labour intensive - no incoming links to most of these URL's, so is there any point? Thanks, Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100