404 ? 301 ? What is your opinion ?
-
Hi,
I have a classifieds website and I am wondering about the life of a page with an ad.
An announcement has therefore a limited life, so : Is a 404 pages? a 301 redirect to the section? let the content without redirection?
What is your opinion?
Sorry for my english, i'm french
Thanks.
A.
-
Thanks for your answer.
I'm afraid I have a lot of pages 404.
why not have a 301 redirect to the parent item or to a results page with a message indicating that the announcement sought does not exist anymore?
-
I agree with Dana on the Custom 404 for classifieds. A 301 could confuse people and increase bounce rate since you're not serving them what they thought they were getting. Whereas a 404 makes perfect sense given the transitory nature of a classified ad. Just make sure to let people know the product/ad/listing is no longer available and give them helpful links.
-
In this instance I would create a Custom 404 page that says something like "We are sorry, this product is no longer available. Here are some helpful links to continue searching our site..."
You could also go the route that eBay uses, although it might prove to be a content management nightmare. eBay leaves up closed auctions for a really long time, but adds the message "This auction has ended."
For classified ads, I wouldn't 301 because, depending on what the item is, it could end up being misleading.
Just my thoughts! I'm interested to know what others think.
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
-
301 Old domain with HTTPS to new domain with HTTPS
I am a bit boggled about https to https we redirected olddomain.com to https://www.newdomain.com, but redirecting https://www.olddomain.com or non-www is not possible. because the certificate does not exist on a level where you are redirecting. only if I setup a new host and add a htaccess file will this work. What should I do? just redirect the rest and hope for the best?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waqid0 -
Is there any benefit to changing 303 redirects to 301?
A year ago I moved my marketplace website from http to https. I implemented some design changes at the same time, and saw a huge drop in traffic that we have not recovered from. I've been searching for reasons for the organic traffic decline and have noticed that the redirects from http to https URLs are 303 redirects. There's little information available about 303 redirects but most articles say they don't pass link juice. Is it worth changing them to 301 redirects now? Are there risks in making such a change a year later, and is it likely to have any benefits for rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAdeit0 -
Reversing the bad effects of a problematic 301 redirect
I have a previously very strong ranking page that is now omitted from the SERPs, but only for one specific keyword phrase. I think I found the reason, which I'll explain, and I hope I can hear some confirmation of my theory and a way to correct it. Let's use the following made up domain and keywords: Political blog SiteA.com had a few news articles about "Blue Widgets" (like 10 out of 10,000 pages). They became exceedingly popular, so on SiteA.com we created a reference-type page about "Blue Widgets" and in the news articles we already had about Blue Widgets we added rich anchor text (Blue Widgets) links that pointed to this new About Blue Widgets page. (long before we wised up about keyword rich anchor texts and Google!) After seeing how much traffic was coming to the About Blue Widgets page, we created a whole new site, SiteB.com, which was about Widgets (not just Blue Widgets), a page for each color of widget, and other pages about widgets. SiteB.com has an important and popular page, SiteB.com/blue-widgets, which is about Blue Widgets. We then 301 redirected the SiteA.com's About Blue Widgets page to SiteB.com/blue-widgets. This page in SiteB.com ranked very high (like #2, #3) for years. Two weeks ago SiteB.com/blue-widgets fell out of the SERPs, but only for the phrase "Blue Widgets". The page still gets lots of traffic from other queries, and even the "Blue Widgets" query will bring up other pages on SiteB.com. So, the only thing hit is the specific query "Blue Widgets" for the specific page SiteB.com/blue-widgets. It seems obvious to me that Google took the combination of a) a site that it probably no longer liked since we sold it (SiteA.com) since it's gone downhill, b) the rich keyword anchor text on SiteA.com pages pointing to the SiteA.com page optimized for that keyword, and c) then being 301 Redirected to a SiteB.com Blue Widgets page optimized for that same anchor text. I only discovered the SiteA.com redirects last week, which I had completely forgotten about, and had them removed right away. My question is, 1) if this indeed was the issue, now that the redirects from SiteA.com to SiteB.com are gone will my ranking eventually go back to normal? and 2) is there anything I can do to get Google to notice the change and have it go back to how it was?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
For URLs that require login, should our redirect be 301 or 302?
We have a login required section of our website that is being crawled and reporting as potential issues in Webmaster Tools. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is - is it to make URLs requiring a login noindex/nocrawl? Right now, we have them 302 redirecting to the login page, since it's a temporary redirect, it seems like it isn't the right solution. Is a 301 better?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alecfwilson0 -
Url rewrite & 301 redirects
Hi all I am having some issues rearding url rewrites and 301 redirects with 1 and 1 hosting and am unsure of the best approach. The website is a custom made shopping cart system with categories and products. The current urls for categories are : index.php?l=product_list&c=1 The new url format required is : /banner-stands The current urls for products are : index.php?l=product_detail&c=1&p=1 The new url format required is : /banner-stands/banner-stand Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vividwebdesign0 -
How important is having a 301 redirect?
Is having a 301 redirect a must for rankings when it comes to the www and non-www version of a site? I am on the bottom of page 1 for my main key phrases but I can't do a 301 redirect with my web host that I've been with for over a year. I've been considering changing web host (currently with Yahoo) but I also have concerns about transferring the site and the impact it might have because of the changing ip address. So my options are Stay Put Change Web host Which would you recommend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Home page url 301 redirect suggestion
Hello, In our site we have already done 301 redirect from http:// to http://www. However, the home page links are still coming in 2 ways http://www.mycarhelpline.com/ http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=search&Itemid=2 Need suggestion We have already use rel canonical is another 301 redirect to be used for maintaining the home page pr from seo point of view. Does google still takes both urls as separate url and finds duplicate content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
301 or 404?
My client has a classified ads website with hundreds of thousands of classified ads. These ads expire quite fast. When the ad expires it gets removed. At the moment this results in a 404 page and thus hundreds of thousands of 404 erros in Webmasters Tools. From what I know this damages SERP results due to slow indexing of important sites and 404 being just plain bad SEO. I suggested doing a 301 from the expired ads to a upper category but this feels like cheating. The content hasn't actually moved, it has been removed. What would you suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PanuKuuluvainen0