Increase 404 errors or 301 redirects?
-
Hi all,
I'm working on an e-commerce site that sells products that may only be available for a certain period of time. Eg. A product may only be selling for 1 year and then be permanently out of stock. When a product goes out of stock, the page is removed from the site regardless of any links it may have gotten over time.
I am trying to figure out the best way to handle these permanently out of stock pages. At the moment, the site is set up to return a 404 page for each of these products. There are currently 600 (and increasing) instances of this appearing on Google Webmasters. I have read that too many 404 errors may have a negative impact on your site, and so thought I might 301 redirect these URLs to a more appropriate page. However I've also read that too many 301 redirects may have a negative impact on your site.
I foresee this to be an issue several years down the road when the site has thousands of expired products which will result in thousands of 404 errors or 301 redirects depending on which route I take.
Which would be the better route? Is there a better solution?
-
That's right.
A soft 404 is still a missing document, but it allows the user to continue through the pages without leaving the website.
Tom
-
Thanks Tom. Just want to clarify with you when you use the term "soft 404 page" in your context. You mean an actual page that exists, but basically lets the visitor know that the product is no longer available for various reasons right? Not a soft 404 url error that Google reports on Webmaster Tools.
-
That shouldn't hurt your site. I rebuild an e-commerce site which had 50.000 redirects in place at the moment i was working on it. Of course it adds a little bit of load to the server but it's not really noticable. This way you will keep the value of the old links.
Thomas Hall is right about the soft 404 pages being generally more acceptable. If you care more about the user experience then about the value from your old links then you could build a dynamic 404 page.
This page should tell the visitor that the product no longer exist and should give them a couple of products which are similar of relevant to the product they were searching for. This way you will improve the user experience with a soft 404.
Just to be clear, you don't have to set a redirect to the home page. You could also do it to the category pages or to popular products. It's very difficult to say since i don't know which branch your in. Who your target group is and what they are interested in.
-
Hi Wesley, thanks for the response. I have no issues with your suggestion, my only concern is the amount of 301 redirection rules that may result of this. Like I said, in several years, the amount of 301 redirection rules can increase to the thousands. I'm afraid this will affect server load & page speed, therefore hurt my site.
-
If you compare 404pages with 301redirections I believe 301 is a better option and here is why!
When a visitor of your website reach to a page that is no more present on your website, they will find the 404 page which may leads the visitor to bounce from the website as usually 404 pages hurt user experience.
The idea is to 301 them to appropriate pages so that they never see any broken page on the website and can easily perform the desired actions while continuing their journey on the website.
This will also help increasing the time on site which will impact positively on your site nad rankings in search engines.
-
Hi there,
What Wesley said is true to a certain extent. This would probably be the best way to do it (301 Redirect) but as an owner of many eCommerce companies, I'd have to disagree. Mainly on the basis that a "soft 404" would be more generally accepted than just being redirected to the homepage for no explanation to why.
Here's an example, your client is selling TV's online and they're using Magento Enterprise. Let's pretend that they have a TV from Sony, it's a 62" LED SmartTV, Full HD, the works and your client has 200 of these in stock and they're selling them around $/£300 cheaper than the competition. The link gets shared around amongst Facebook, Twitter, HotUkDeals etc.
So let's say after just 7 days, they sell out of this awesome offer... Somebody see's the link late (Facebook, Twitter, etc, it happens) and when they click on that link the website loads but the product doesn't, they just see the homepage. They're going to waste around 15 minutes perhaps searching for that product that you and I both know, doesn't exist anymore.
So what we tend to do, is create a "soft 404" page, which is basically a page apologising for the missing product, explaining that it may be out of stock, temporarily removed from the website etc, but at the same time we will have an array of SIMILAR products that may interest someone who wanted a 62" LED Full HD SmartTV.
I don't know whether I'd say this is a great SEO advantage or a great marketing advantage, but either way, in my personal opinion, I'd say this is a much better option than just pointing the customer/browser to the homepage when they are in search of something specific and don't get a reason to why they're seeing the homepage and not the fantastic offer they've seen!
Hope this answer helps you, even if it's just insightful!
Tom
-
The 301 redirect would be a better option.
I will try to explain why this is better than a 404 page.
1. If people posted a link to the product PageRank to your website.(This is one of the ranking factors in Google) If the page doesn't exist anymore and brings up the 404 page it will lose the value from all the links to that particular product. If you use a 301 redirect to send visitors to a relevant product or to the homepage then the value from those links will have effect on the page where you send them to.
2. Nobody likes a 404 page. There are very cool things you can do with a 404 page so that they are still helpful to the visitor such as most popular pages, a search function and even jokes. But in the end nobody would have clicked on the link or typed in the url to your website and think: Now i want to see his 404 page.
I hope i answered your question. Let me know if anything was unclear.
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
-
Woocommerce add-to-cart causing increase in temporary redirect
Hi, I was wondering is negatively influencing the SEO. Woocommerce add-to-cart is, logically, a 302. However, MOZ is alarming that there is a large amount of temporary redirects on my site. Do I have to act on this or just leave as is? I change the nofollow to follow but not sure if this does more harm then good. Would like to hear some input regarding this issue.
Technical SEO | | ruevoliere0 -
Old Content after 301 Redirect Success
Hi, I want to ask what need I do to the old content after my 301 redirect to the new domain with the same content success? Do I need to remove that old content? Nothing bad happen right? Thanks
Technical SEO | | matthewparkman0 -
Best strategy to handle over 100,000 404 errors.
I recently been given a site that has over one-hundred thousand 404 error codes listed in Google Webmasters. It is really odd because according to Google Webmasters, the pages that are linking to these 404 pages are also pages that no longer exist (they are 404 pages themselves). These errors were a result of site migration that had occurred. Appreciate any input on how one might go about auditing and repairing large amounts of 404 errors. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | SEO_Promenade0 -
Massive Increase in 404 Errors in GWT
Last June, we transitioned our site to the Magento platform. When we did so, we naturally got an increase in 404 errors for URLs that were not redirected (for a variety of reasons: we hadn't carried the product for years, Google no longer got the same string when it did a "search" on the site, etc.). We knew these would be there and were completely fine with them. We also got many 404s due to the way Magento had implemented their site map (putting in products that were not visible to customers, including all the different file paths to get to a product even though we use a flat structure, etc.). These were frustrating but we did custom work on the site map and let Google resolve those many, many 440s on its own. Sure enough, a few months went by and GWT started to clear out the 404s. All the poor, nonexistent links from the site map and missing links from the old site - they started disappearing from the crawl notices and we slowly went from some 20k 404s to 4k 404s. Still a lot, but we were getting there. Then, in the last 2 weeks, all of those links started showing up again in GWT and reporting as 404s. Now we have 38k 404s (way more than ever reported). I confirmed that these bad links are not showing up in our site map or anything and I'm really not sure how Google found these again. I know, in general, these 404s don't hurt our site. But it just seems so odd. Is there any chance Google bots just randomly crawled a big ol' list of outdated links it hadn't tried for awhile? And does anyone have any advice for clearing them out?
Technical SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
301 redirects
Hi, I am a working on a new web site, and I want to redirect all the urls of another site (on a different host) to this one. According to both hosts it is "impossible" to do this for all urls. I don't believe that to be the case, but how do I do this? And, should both sites be hosted on the same server first?
Technical SEO | | vibelingo0 -
301 redirect from root to /index.aspx
I have taken over the SEO for www.domain.net. The way i've inherited the setup is that www.domain.net is 301 redirected to www.domain.net/index.aspx Looking at top pages and linking root domains in Opensiteexplorer I can see that www.domain.net/index.aspx has 1,006 linking root domains www.domain.net has 806 linking root domains. I assume that www.domain.net is passing the value of it's 806 domain links to www.domain.net/index.aspx via the 301 redirect and because of this would expect www.domain.net/index.aspx to be the strongest page on the site and be the url that ranks in the listings for many relevant searches. It appears however that www.domain.net is what is shown in listings and not www.domain.net/index.aspx ?? Can anyone explain why this might be?? If I do a site: search in Google then www.domain.net is indexed and not www.domain.net/index.aspx ??
Technical SEO | | QubaSEO0 -
301 Redirect Properly To Keep the Juice
I have a bunch of WP Blogs and was thinking of taking all linkjuice from these to my main money site. The most of the other WP Blogs is hosted at godaddy.com (domain and site) and I know they have a URL Redirects page in site manager but I`m not sure this is the right way to go. Also I wonder some of these sites have hundreds of blogposts there is no way I can "re-create" those on the money site but I am sure that is not a must-thing to do in order to keep the "juice" right or wrong? Last but not least, I was wondering if you think it would be best to redirect the sites to relevant pages on money sites. For instance if i had a domain called cheap-ties.com with 100 blogposts about this and on money site a webshop with a category called ties, should redirect to this or to main domain or doesnt it matter?
Technical SEO | | fAgBxa8b0