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Our website supports a unique business industry where our users will come to us to look for something very specific (a very specific product name) to find out where they can get it.  The problem that we're facing is that the products are constantly changing due to the industry.

So, for example, one month, one product might be found on our website, and the next, it might be removed completely... and then might come back again a couple months later.  All things that are completely out of our control - and we have no way of receiving any sort of warning when these things might happen.

Because of this, we're seeing a lot of duplicate content issues arise...

For Example...

Product A is not active today... so   www.mysite.com/search/productA  will return no results... Product B is also not active today... so  www.mysite.com/search/productB will also return no results.

As per Moz Analytics, these are showing up as duplicate content because both pages indicate "No results were found for {your searched term}."

Unfortunately, it's a bit difficult to return a 204 in these situations (which I don't know if a 204 would help anyway) or a 404, because, for a faster user experience, we simultaneously render different sections of the page... so in the very beginning of the page load - we start rendering the faster content (template type of content) that says "returning 200 code, we got the query successfully & we're loading the page".. the unique content results finish loading last since they take the longest.

I'm still very new to the SEO world, so would greatly appreciate any ideas or suggestions that might help with this... I'm stuck.

Thanks in advance!

Thanks so much, everyone!  Very helpful.

Yes-- @Ben, you were correct in your assumption.  Keep them the same as the old site.

I started revamping the tags for the new site already, as you suggested, so I'll have those ready to go after everything is set and done and being indexed on the new site.

Thank you again!

We're creating a new version of our entire website - look and feel is completely different, though core functionality and results are the same.  Just cleaner, faster.. etc.  We're doing a temp redirect to the temporary url for testing and to slow roll the release to some of our users for a more friendly approach.  Eventually, the new look and feel will be under the original url.

I've researched best practices for the site transfer, including "make sure the meta tags for title and description are exactly the same".

The concern I have is that Moz Analytics is detecting a lot of errors in the existing meta tags.  They're too long, have changed and become inconsistent after being passed through different hands, & some have some keyword stuffing in there.

I have plans to change them out and really clean them up... I'm just wondering, when is the best time to do that?

Since the tags are bad, should I just do it now but make sure that the old and new are matching?  Or should I wait (and for how long?) after the new site is switched over and everything is on the original URL?