Inventory Pages that are Sold, 404 vs 301?

[Andy_Staple]

I am working with a company that sells high-priced automobiles. Each Unit has its own URL

We currently leave most sold inventory live on the site as it draws in many leads (the units are visually shown as sold, so it shouldn't be a UX issue in most cases).

We are wanting to start pruning some old units (this is in WordPress - custom post type) and I'm not quite sure what the best solution for this site is with removed units. Some ideas:

• Remove the units pages that are no longer needed, resulting in any links 404'ing to a useful 404 page.
• Remove the units pages, and 301 them to the Homepage (I don't really want to do this, as it seems like really poor UX)
• Remove the units page, and 301 the user to a specific "This item has sold" page that is shared by all sold units, but may not be the sites full 404.
• another option I haven't thought of?

I dont' want to do anything that would confuse or get search engines upset, and I'm not sure how bad 404's are, I see some info on how bad they are, some that say they aren't bad. I'm guessing it is as usual, some gray area in the middle.

[CleverPhD]

I agree with Moosa, but would add another layer of analysis on this.  You need to do a type of content audit on these pages.   You can go into GA to just look at traffic or use a tool (my new favorite) called URL Profiler to pull GA and OSE and Majestic link data plus social media shares on your sold product URLs.

For each sold product page you have two options:

1. 301 the page - If the "sold' page generates a fair amount of traffic, and even has some links coming in, you probably want to 301 redirect it.  The 301 needs to be to a page with similar semantic information.  Ideally this would be a main product category page so you can build the traffic to that page.

Example: If you sell Ford Mustangs and you have a lot of "sold" pages of Ford Mustangs, and those sold pages still get traffic and even have some links to them, you want to 301 those pages to your main category Ford Mustang page that has links to all of your Ford Mustangs that are still for sale.  Good for Google, good for the user.  Key point is that a) the "sold" pages are still generating value (traffic and links) and b) that you redirect to a semantically related page.  If you use a 301 to redirect to the home page that is a bad idea as it needs to be closely related in topic.   When looking at a "Ford Mustang for sale" page, a multiple car brands for sale page (your home page theme) is not as closely related to it as your main Ford Mustangs for sale category page.   It would also behoove you to really make that Ford Mustang for sale category page really kick a$$ content wise.

2. 410/404 the page - If you find a large group of "sold" pages that do not get very much traffic to them and/or they do not have much link equity, just let them 404/410.  Show a helpful not found page with links to other sections of your site and even a search function.   FYI - I like the 410 directive as it is a "permanently gone" directive vs a temporary one.

How do you get the data I am talking about on all the "sold" pages?  Using a tool like URL profiler, you put in all of your "sold" URLs and the software uses an API to get data from Search Console, GA, OSE and Majestic (among other tools) and pulls them into a single line per sheet.  You can then look for each URL any of the data and determine if you use option #1 or option #2.   Moz has an article on how to do a content audit you can search the web for other examples.  A simpler version of this would be to use the advanced search within GA and pull the organic landing page traffic on those pages.

Some SEOs would say that option #2 is blasphemy. ie. you always want to 301 redirect.  Why would you ever want to lose traffic by setting up a 410?  That will cause errors to show up in Search Console!  You will lose link equity and traffic!

This is why you have to perform the content audit.   If you have 1,000 pages but 800 of them send next to no traffic to your site and have generated 2 links, you can 410 the 800 pages and never notice the difference. You will not miss the traffic or links as they had none to begin with!   All those 800 pages are doing is wasting your crawl budget with Google and giving a signal to Google that you have a bunch of low quality pages on your website.  Also, don't panic when you see all the 410 in Search Console.  Just sort by date and then by priority to make sure that these are all the pages that you want to 410.  Over time (about 3-4 months) they will naturally fall out.

[MoosaHemani]

Here are few of the options I would have considered, if I would be at your place.

-          If the page done not contain too many quality links, why not design a custom 404 page and take tell user that the unit is sold but they can contact the website to enquire more about other available units.

This will save potential leads and still allow them to convert in to paying customers for the company

-          Another option if there are quality links available is to 301redirect it to other similar units available on the website.  This way the redirected page will get more link juice and they tend to get better rankings in search engine from the targeted keyphrases.

This way you will get audience to land on the new unites and possibly convert in to leads.

-          301 to Home page. In my opinion this is the bad idea as people are searching for particular unit and sending them to the home page will confuse them and they might bounce instead of converting in to leads.

Bad UX which leads to lower conversion rate!

Hope this helps!