301 or 410 a Pop Up Window with a New URL

[rhoadesjohn]

I asked our development team to 301 Pop Up window URLs back to their complimentary product page as we've changed URLs for all of our Pop Ups. We have 100,000s of products on our site, so the number of rewrites are becoming unmanageable and slows server response times (their words).

They want to kill these 301's after a prescribed amount of time.

Should they just become 410s, leave them as 404s (current state), or insist that we keep them as 301's?

[Kara.Wallace]

Right on.

Yeah, I would just leave them as 404s and if they are indexed by Google, they will eventually be removed from the index.

Mike

[rhoadesjohn]

Thank you both for the quick responses.

Mike G., your understanding is correct.  It was referred to me from the dev team to redirect the old pop up url to the product page.  Seemed a little off to me, but they were willing to do it until they realized how many redirects would be involved.

There isn't much linking to the pop ups to worry about.

Sounds like leaving them as a 404 is the best solution?

[Kara.Wallace]

I am a little confused by your question, but let me see if I understand what you are saying:

You have a product page, then you have any accompanying pop-up for it, and you just changed all of the URLs for the pop-ups and the old pop-up URLs are redirecting to the product page?

Were you getting a lot of people linking to the pop-up URLs? That is really the only reason you'd need to 301 them (in my opinion). If not, then ONLY redirect the popular pop-up URLs. This would definitely help with load times.

And your dev team is probably correct. If you have 100,000 lines of redirects, that is going to slow things down. Depending on your environment, you could potentially set up rules that would redirect things; however, it may be difficult depending on your URL structure/pattern.

As far as 410 or 404, a 410 usually alerts Google to remove the URL from its index faster than a 404, but in the end they essentially work the same.

Hope this helps,

Mike

[MikeRoberts]

Are the pop-ups receiving any decent organic traffic or do they have good, viable links pointing at them?

If not, then remove any internal links pointing to the pop-up and 404 them.

If they do then I would say 301s are the preferred method.

A possible alternative might be placing canonical tags on those pages and giving visitors a link to the correct page.