What should happen to expired real estate listings?
-
For a real estate website, when a house is sold or taken off of the market. What should happen to the listing? 301 redirect it to the grouping (such as zip code or city) which that listing resides in? 404 it?
-
Do you let the old URLs 404 or do you redirect them?
-
So after a year or two there would be thousands of 301 redirects - would you eventually delete these after a year or two?
-
I'd usually say redirect it to a category page (zip code or city) straight away but from a users point of view it may not be the best thing to do. Maybe leave the page up with a sold sign and then have a "you may also like" section underneath so they know the house is gone but there are some other options, probably the best for UX. After a few weeks, I'd then 301 it to a category page.
-
What I do (I also work on a real estate website):
Short-term (maybe one or two weeks): Leave as is but have a "sold" banner over the listing.
Afterwards: Delete it.
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
-
Google Detecting Real Page as Soft 404 Error
We've migrated my site from HTTP to HTTPS protocols in Sep 2017 but I noticed after migration soft 404 granularly increasing. Example of soft 404 page: https://bit.ly/2xBjy4J But these soft 404 error pages are real pages but Google still detects them as soft 404. When I checked the Google cache it shows me the cache but with HTTP page. We've tried all possible solutions but unable to figure out why Google is still indexing to HTTP pages and detecting HTTPS pages as soft 404 error. Can someone please suggest a solution or possible cause for this issue or anyone same issue like this in past.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bheard0 -
Http to Https implementation - What happens to the backlinks?
UPDATE: Found a source that says that Google recognizes the redirects, so it should be fine leaving backlinks as is - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-link-https-20552.html Hi again Mozers, When a site's protocol is changed from http to https, what impact would it have on the backlinks? Especially, when the backlinks doesn't contain any protocal mentioned. Thanks in advance Malika
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Is irrelevant backlinks real? And does anchor text affect all keywords?
I ask because I see many of my competitors with irrelevant backlinks still ranking at the top, despite what SEO say about it. I have a Web Design business, most of my competitors have their backlinks from sites they built ie "website by _____" and thats how they rank at the top. Should I keep getting backlinks from my clients (with permission)? Also does anchor text on backlinks affect all keywords in your website? Example is if you provide multi services ie plastering and decorating. You have 100 links pointing to your site with anchor text of "plastering". Technically your site still has 100 backlinks, will that also help boost the onsite optimisation for the keyword "decorating"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marvellous0 -
350 (Out the 750) Internal Links Listed by Webmaster Tools Dynamically Generated-Best to Remove?
Greetings MOZ Community: When visitors enter real estate search parameters in our commercial real estate web site, the parameters are somehow getting indexed as internal links in Google Webmaster Tools. About half are 700 internal links are derived from these dynamic URLs. It seems to me that these dynamic alphanumeric URL links would dilute the value of the remaining static links. Are the dynamic URLs a major issue? Are they high priority to remove? The dynamic URLs look like this: /listings/search?fsrepw-search-neighborhood%5B%5D=m_0&fsrepw-search-sq-ft%5B%5D=1&fsrepw-search-price-range%5B%5D=4&fsrepw-search-type-of-space%5B%5D=0&fsrepw-search-lease-type=1 These URLs do not show up when a SITE: URL search is done on Google!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
How to best handle expired content?
Similar to the eBay situation with "expired" content, what is the best way to approach this? Here are a few examples. With an e-commerce site, for a seasonal category of "Christmas" .. what's the best way to handle this category page after it's no longer valid? 404? 301? leave it as-is and date it by year? Another example. If I have an RSS feed of videos from a big provider, say Vevo, what happens when Vevo tells me to "expire" a video that it's no longer available? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB0 -
Expired News Content
Ive read some stuff about expired content here, but have yet to find an answer so I thought I would post my question is regarding a news based site and expired content issues. So my site does Recaps, and Previews for sporing events. Well eventually the content does become not relevant as nobody cares about a prediction after the game is done. What would be the best method to deal with this? Should I just leave it there or 301 redirect it to the more relevant games. The reason why I'm asking is because when I have added a more recent game such as New York vs Boston, when I would search for that keyword in google, the page google would show would be like Atlanta vs L.A. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ravashjalil0 -
SEOMoz Paid Directories List.... Are paid links always bad?
We all know paid links are bad.... so it begs the question.... why does the SEOMoz directory list have so many directories that only submit businesses for a fee.... i.e. a paid link. Are they worth paying for or not? Interested to hear peoples thoughts and experiences with some of the directories listed on the SEOMoz directory list....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Google local listing
I have a site and i registerd for local listing in google but i have not received any letter from google.It is second time i request for pin one month back and this time also did not received letter from google. what should i do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000