422 vs 404 Status Codes
-
We work with an automotive industry platform provider and whenever a vehicle is removed from inventory, a 404 error is returned. Being that inventory moves so quickly, we have a host of 404 errors in search console.
The fix that the platform provider proposed was to return a 422 status code vs a 404. I'm not familiar with how a 422 may impact our optimization efforts. Is this a good approach, since there is no scalable way to 301 redirect all of those dead inventory pages.
-
Thanks Mike.
Your initial solution would be preferred, but its not scalable. We are talking about over 100 websites with varying levels of inventory.
I was thinking along the lines of the keeping the 404 or 410 status. It was just odd when the vendor proposed a 422 error, when its not a preferred option in Google's support pages. I was just wondering if anyone used the 422 response code before and if so, why.
-
Personally I think you should set up a process whereby every time a vehicle and/or part is removed, you have someone automatically 301 it to the previous step in the site navigation. So when "blue widget 3" is removed from the site, anyone landing on that page or who has it bookmarked winds up on the "Widget" category page. Now there may not be an easy way to do it right this second because of how many there are now, but if you get in the habit of doing it and slowly work toward fixing the others then you'll be in a good position in the future to keep this from being an issue again.
Now if you really don't want to attempt that... 404s aren't necessarily horrible (too many can be). If your site is properly serving 404s then you won't be penalized for it but in this case you might want to consider using 410 status codes. Its a stronger signal for removal than a 404 and you don't plan on the product ever coming back so marking it Gone should get it removed from the index faster while also helping to keep you from competing against yourself in the SERPs when a new but similar product comes into stock.
-
Do pages of vehicles that are in inventory for a short time actually deliver monetizable traffic?
If the answer is no, because they are up for such a short amount of time, you would have to weigh the value of having them indexable in the first place vs creating an ever-growing list of missing pages.
Having a lot of 404s or 422s is a bit of a negative. Is there really no way to add the step of 301ing to their removal?
Making the pages non-indexable via noindex once they are indexed will not remove them. You either have to 301 and/or request removal from the G's index. Is there a programmatic way to turn their removal into a 301 to the top inventory category page?
Good luck!
-
A 422 is an unprocessable error, which I think will have as much impact as a 404 (page not found error).
You could make pages non indexable once a vehicle has been removed from the inventory. This shouldn't impact you SEO efforts.
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
-
Content change within the same URL/Page (UX vs SEO)
Context: I'm asking my client to create city pages so he can present all of his appartements in that specific sector so i can have a page that ranks for "appartement for rent in +sector". The page will present a map with all the sector so the user can navigate and choose the sector he wants after he landed on the page. Question: The UX team is asking if we absolutly need to reload the sector page when the user is clicking the location on the map or if they can switch the content within the same page/url once the user is on the landing page. My concern: 1. Can this be analysed as duplicate content if Google can crawl within the javascript app or if Google only analyse his "first view" of the page. 2. Do you consider that it would be preferable to keep the "page change" so i'm increasing the number of page viewed ?
Technical SEO | | alexrbrg0 -
301 vs 302
Hello everyone! I'm working with a site right now that is currently formatted as subdomain.domain.net. The old version of the site was formatted as domain.net, with domain.com and several other variants redirecting to the current format, subdomain.domain.net. All of these redirects are 302, and I'm wondering if I should have all these changed to 301. Many of our old backlinks go to the old format of domain.net and i know the juice isn't being passed through, but i was wondering if there is any reason why you may want a 302 over a 301 in this case? Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KathleenDC0 -
Site hacked, but can't find the code
Discovered some really odd words ranking for us in WMT. Looked further and found pages like this www.pdnseek.com/wll/canadian-24-hour-pharmacy. When you click it it redirects to the home page. The developers can't find /wll anywhere on the site. The pages are indexed and cached. Looked at the back links in moz and found many backlinks to our site from other sites using URLs like this. The host says there is nothing on the server, but where else could it be. We've run virus scans, nothing, looked through source code, nothing. Anyone with some idea? www.pdnseek.com is the URL
Technical SEO | | Britewave0 -
Screaming Frog showing 503 status code. Why?
Screaming Frog is showing a 503 code for images. If I go and use a header checker like SEOBook it shows 200. Why would that be? Here is an example link- http://germanhausbarn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/36-UPC-5145536-John-Deere-Stoneware-Logo-Mug-pair-25.00-Heavy-4-mugs-470x483.jpg
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Server return 404 and 200 status
Dear All,
Technical SEO | | omverma
We have a website where we are showing some products. Many times it happens when we remove any product and add that again later. In our site, we have product list page and detail page. So if any product get deleted and client hits the detail page with deleted product url, then we are returning 404. Next time when that product will be available our server will return 200. I have two questions : 1. Is is right way to deal with deleted product ? 2. After deploying it, we observed that our keywords ranking is going down, is that really affect ? Thanks,
Om0 -
Time to deindexing: WMT Request vs. Server not found
Google indexed some subdomains (13!) that were never supposed to exist, but apparently returned a 200 code when Google somehow crawled them. I can get these subdomains to return a "server not found" error by turning off wildcard subdomains at my DNS. I've been told that these subdomains will be deindexed just from this server not found error. I was going to use Webmaster Tools and verify each domain, but I'm on an economy goDaddy server and apparently subdomains just get forwarded to a directory, so subdomain.domain.com gets redirected to domain.com/subdomain. I'm not even sure with this being the case, if I can get WMT to recognize and remove these subdomains like that. Should I fret about this, or will the "server not found" message get Google to remove these soon enough?
Technical SEO | | erin_soc0 -
External Microsite VS Internal Folder
We would like to create either a new website or a new section of our existing website that will feature (in time) a lot of content including a forum, video training, tutorials and downloadable resources. Logistically, it would be much easier to create this in a new site (we'll call it newproduct.com) and refer people to the new site. We would, however, like to keep all of that content on our existing site for the sake of content building and SEO. Should we: Duplicate the content and use no index no follow and/or rel canonical? Host all of the content on our site and set up a vanity domain (www.newproduct.com) to point people to the deep linked area (www.mainsite.com/product/newproductinfo)? Host the content only on an external site with the occasional link back to our main site? I realize there are other options but they're mostly variants of the above. Our main objectives are to make it easy for people to get to while leveraging the new content for SEO purposes. What are the pros and cons of these different approaches? What seems to make the most sense? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | BeijerElectronics0 -
.COM vs .CA rankings - .CA ranks on Google.com
Hi SEOMOZers, We have a fairly large retail client with both .COM and .CA domains. Each of the sites are almost identical in design and, in most cases, content (these would be product pages). The .US site has been live for nearly 2.5 years while the Canadian probably over a year younger or so. Both sites are hosted in the US. What we're starting to see as of the last few months are searches that used to rank .COM product pages now rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com. We've checked Webmaster Tools for each site and they target the appropriate country. With nearly all examples we've seen, we haven't noticed any more links pointing to the Canadian page, and where this is becoming a widespread occurence we're not convinced it's a linking issue. My question is why Google might see both versions but rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com for a search being performed in the US? Does anyone have any ideas on why this may be happening?
Technical SEO | | HarborOneBank0