What to use instead of a 404

[AngelosS]

Hey there Mozzers,

What would be preferable to use instead of a 404 on a ecommerce website.

Can I use a 301 redirection to the main category of the product? So for example if I have a t-shirt that is not available anymore can I use a 301 to redirect the traffic to the clothing category?

[badgergravling]

Hi,

It's not about 'using 404 pages'. It's about removing the occurence of a 404 page when a product isn't available...

So the answer is yes. It's fine to redirect what was a product page to the main relevant category page if that product is no longer available and you don't plan on restocking in the future.

In fact it's recommended if you want to preserve a large percentage of the link equity the original page has built up, and hopefully provide a good user experience by allowing customers to find alternative products.

The only issue is if you have thousands of products being discontinued, then the amount of 301s can affect the speed of your website. But I've managed redirects for websites with 100s of thousands of products, and 10s of thousands of error pages without any issue.

I'd echo Yossi in saying that it may be worth creating a custom 404 Error Page which helps your users if they encounter it, and also improves your branding - with most eCommerce sites with large inventories, it's inevitable error pages will crop up despite your best efforts.

And I'd echo Nitin in saying that if you might get the product back again, you're better leaving the pages on the site and allowing customers to register their interest when it reappears...

[_nitman]

Hi AngeloS,

I agree with Yossi that soft 404 is not a good practice if the product isn't available.

But here, you're talking about the case where your product isn't available anymore, which is not the 404 case clearly. 404 means, resource not found on the website. So, your page is not 404 semantically as page it still there with a different availability status.

Here comes my recommendations on this:

• If the "product" is temporarily unavailable, you can show an appropriate message with 200 http status. Additionally,  for better UX, you can show a recommendation bar showing other related products and a notify-me option where you can get user's email id on which you can send a notification mail as soon as this product gets back in stock.
• If the "product" is permanently discontinued and you want to get rid of that page altogether, you can probably show 200 http status with an appropriate message and have a noindex tag on these pages, or you can start showing 410 http status if you want to convey a message to bots that your "page" won't come back ever.

You can read more about HTTP status codes here.

Hope this helps!

[Yoav-Blustein]

Hi..

Google guidelines recommends that If a page does not exist, you should state that clearly to the user and return a 404 page.
What you really need to do is to set up a very clever 404 page so you will not loose the client. There are many ecommerce sites that have super clever 404 pages where users are able to see similar items that are in stock, make a search or go to different page.. Just be creative and research what works for your competitors.

Using 301 to 404 pages is a bad practice in general..

Good luck