What to use instead of a 404
-
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?
-
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...
-
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!
-
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
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
-
If I use content from DomainA on DomainB, but spread it - how do I implement the canoncial tag?
Hey community, I have a question regarding canonical tags.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ElliPirelli
I used the content of one of my domains (nameA.com/ContentA) and copied it to another domain, but on several pages: nameB.com/ContentA1
nameB.com/ContentA2
nameB.com/ContentA3
and so on). So I divided the content from domainA to several pages of domainB. The reason is, that my client wants to build a new business on domainB and wants to use the exact same content from domainA, because he can't afford another copywriter at the moment (and he doesn't want to rewrite it himself). Problem: DomainA is ranking for this content and he wants to keep the rankings, until domainB ranks similar (for the same keywords, of course). So my question is: Can I put a canonical tag on domainA?
My thoughts are: Not a single page of domainB is 100% duplicate content, as it's always only partialy the same. Can I just choose one of those pages from domainB to put as link-goal for the canonical tag? Or do I need to create a "view-all" page on domainB, with all the content put together, so it's 100% duplicate to domainA, and then put a canonical tag to domainA and link to this "view-all" page? If I do so, do I need to also put canonicals on every single page from domainB, to link to this "view-all" page?
IMPORTANT: Would the other pages of domainB then be ranked/listed in the SERRPs, or only the "view-all" site? I would really appreciate your help, as I have been seaching for answers to this specific problem since more than a week... Thank you! Best regards0 -
Pagination loading with using AJAX. Should I change this?
Hello, while I was checking this site; http://www.disfracessimon.com/disfraces-adultos-16.html I found that the pagination is working this way http://www.disfracessimon.com/disfraces-adultos-16.html#/page-2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
http://www.disfracessimon.com/disfraces-adultos-16.html#/page-3 and content is being loaded using AJAX. So, google is not getting the paginated results. Is this a big issue or there is no problem?
Should I create a link for See All Products or there is not a big issue? Thank you!0 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
For a mobile website, is it better to use a 301 vs. a 302 redirect?
We are vetting a vendor for our mobile website and they are recommending using a 302 redirect with rel=canonical vs. a 301 redirect due to 301 caching issues. All the research I've done shows that a 301 is by far the better way to go do to proper indexing, which in turn will enhance our page authority. Thoughts on why a 302 would be a better fit than a 301 on our mobile site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seohdsupply1 -
Handful of internal pages penguin penalized. 302 them or let them 404?
We have a site that is for the most part doing great, but the internal pages that received too much link building received some penguin penalties (no warning in WMT) but it's fairly obvious. Has anyone tried letting these pages 404 and just creating new URL's? Or 302 redirecting the old URL's to new ones?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Using exact keyword domains for local SEO
The website is for the attorney that serves several nearby cities. The main page is optimized for the biggest central city. I have several options how to go after the smaller surrounding cities: 1. Create optimized pages inside the main domain 2. Get more or less exact keyword domains for each city e.g. for the city ABC get yourABClawyer.com and then a) use 1 page websites that use the same template as main website and link all the menu items to the main website b)use 1 page website with a link "for more information go to our main website" c) point exact keyword domains to the optimized pages within the main domain. Which option would be the best in terms of SEO and user experience? Would people freak out if they click on the menu item and go to a different domain website even though it uses the same template (option 2a) Would I get more bounces with option 2b in your opinion? Would option 2c have any positive SEO effect? Should I not even bother with exact keyword domain and go with option 1?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SirMax1 -
Why specify robots instead of googlebot for a Panda affected site?
Daniweb is the poster child for sites that have recovered from Panda. I know one strategy she mentioned was de-indexing all of her tagged content, fo rexample: http://www.daniweb.com/tags/database Why do you think more Panda affected sites specifying 'googlebot' rather than 'robots' to capture traffic from Bing & Yahoo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Status Code 404: But why?
Google Web Master Tool reported me that I have several 404 staus code., First they were 2, after 4..6 and 10, right now. Every time I add a new page. I've got a no CMS managed website. After old website was been deleted, I installed Wordpress, created new page and deleted and blocked (robots.txt) old page. Infact all page not found don't exist!!! (Pic: Page not found). The strange thing is that no pages link to those 404 pages (All Wordpress Created page are new!!!). Seomoz doesn't report me any 404 error (Pic 3) I controlled all my pages: No "strange" link in any pages No link reported by Seomoz tool Bu why GWMT reports me that one? How can I risolve that problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Greenman
I'm going crazy!!! Regards
Antonio BgelG.png eCaDU.png ZIi2f.jpg0