301 page into a 404

[AndrewAkesson]

Hi

I have a job board site and the way the site is built means that I cant 404 job pages once they have expired. To combat this Im looking to 301 the pages into a 404 page.Do any of you have any experience with this? Are there any potential pitfalls to doing a 404 this way?

Thanks

[AlanMosley]

If you can do a 301 you should be able to do a 404

[neenor]

One of my clients has a busy e-commerce site and regularly removes entire ranges of products (which are seasonal). As soon as this is done we update the sitemap.xml and that sitemap is linked to Google Webmaster Tools. As such the 404s don't appear for very long at all, because the sitemap is used to determine which pages to crawl. Therefore the deleted pages are dropped and don't cause any issues (you can monitor this via Google Webmaster Tools).

[AndrewAkesson]

Hey Neenor

We would like to do that in the future but it require development time we dont have at the moment (create a 404 page with a list of similar jobs). Im more concerned about the fact Google sees that we are regularly sending them to 404 pages through 301 redirects when a job listing has expired.

[neenor]

Hi

If it's a small site you could manually update the expired job to say that the job is no longer available 'but you might like the following' and link to similar jobs. It would keep the visitor on your site and perhaps lead them to something they'd be interested in.

If you want to automate it I'd set up a standard 404 with a site search in it to recommend searching further (as opposed to losing the visitor completely). Not sure why it wouldn't be possible to set up a 404?