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We have a medium traffic site (www.boatshed.com) which sells used boats, the site does fairly well for popular search phrases, often ranking on first page. A common way for people to search is by boat manufacturer, for example "sunseeker for sale" or "sunseeker 33 for sale". To service those searches, we have search results page with URL's like: "/used-boats-for-sale/sunseeker" and "/used-boats-for-sale/sunseeker/33" (i.e. make and model). This is fine for common makes but we have a lot of makes where we might have just one which, when sold, then leaves the page with no boats to show. It could then be just weeks till we get another one or sometimes years. Once a manufacturer has no boats for sale, we automatically remove the link to that page from the site and from the sitemap. These pages are now being flagged as soft 404s in Webmaster tools. Currently these pages still work and just show a "No results found" message. I am unsure of how to deal with these pages. Options as I see them: Add a "no-index, follow" tag to the pages and continue to remove them from the sitemap. My concern is that when we do get a new boat for sale, the page will not rank again or take a long time to be re-indexed. Add value to the 'no results found' page - for example, show listings for similar boats. If I do this (which makes sense from a usability perspective), would it be acceptable to leave these pages with an "index" tag? 404 them - my concern being this basically says "this page has been permanently removed" when actually it will probably have content again soon. 301 redirect to a page of similar boats with a message that we don't have any of that specific type at the moment.

Hello, I have read a lot about optimising product pages and not indexing search results or category pages as ideally a person should be directed straight to a product page. I am interested in how best to approach a site that is listing second hand products for sale - essentially a marketplace of second hand goods (in my case, www.boatshed.com - international boat brokers). For example, we currently have 5 Colvic Sailer 26 boats for sale across the world - that is 5 boats of the same make and model but differing years, locations, sellers and prices. My concern is with search results and 'category' pages. Unlike typical e-commerce sites, when someone searches for a 'Colvic sailer 26 for sale' I want them to go to a search results style page as it is more useful for them to see a list of boats than one random one that Google decides is most important (or possibly one it can match by location). Currently we have 3 different URL types to show search results style pages (i.e. paginated lists of boats that include name, image and short description):
manufacturer URL's e.g. http://www.boatshed.com/colvic-manufacturer-145.html
category URL's e.g. barges http://www.boatshed.com/barges-category-55.html
and normal search results e.g. dosearch.php?form_boattype_textbox=&.... I have noindexed the search results pages but our category and manufacturer URLs show up in search results and ultimately these are pages I want people to land on. I am however getting duplicate content warnings in Moz. Most boats are in several categories and all will come up on 1 manufacturer and one manufacturer and model page. Both sets of URL's are in my opinion needed; lots of users search for exact makes / models and lots of users just search for the type of boat e.g. 'barge for sale' so both sets of landing pages are useful. Any suggestions or thoughts greatly appreciated Thanks Ben