301, 302, 404 or 410
-
Hello,
We have an ecommerce site and it's very normal for products to be discontinued by the manufacturer. We used to leave the pages up to keep the content and link equity. Now we feel this is misleading for the customer and we have started to remove pages for discontinued items. Customers trying to reach these pages get a nice Product Not Found page with an explanation and links to categories. The shopping cart sends a 302 code.
Google Webmaster Tools was complaining about "soft 404's" and apparently didn't like this. We tried changing to a 404 return code but couldn't get the nice Product Not Found page to display. Plus, GWT and SEOmoz started to complain about 404 errors.
I think we've reached a solution where we can send a 301 and still display the desired Product Not Found page. This might be the best solution. We'll see if we get errors from SEOmoz or GWT. However, a 410 return code would probably be most correct but we'd like to salvage any link equity we can but we really want to be "good citizens" and do things right.
Should we really be sending a 410 in this case even if we lose seo equity or are we OK with the 301 and the nice information page?
Thanks,
Tom
-
I agree with David and Moosa.
Redirect to the category page if it is genuinely useful for your visitor. So in some cases you might want to put user experience above retaining link juice within that category and either redirect elsewhere or create a custom page.
-
The best idea is to 301 to removed product’s category page or a custom page that explains why the page does not exist anymore what are the ideal paces on the website to go and find similar products....
-
I agree with David
-
410 will kill the link equity. In cases similar to yours, I have implemented a 301 to the category page of the product removed. This gives users products similar to the one they were looking for, and retains link equity.
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
-
What is the difference between rel canonical and 301's?
Hi Guys I have been told a few times to add the rel canonical tag to my category pages - however every category page actually is different from the other - besides the listings that I have for my staff on each pages. Some of them specialise in areas that cross over in other areas - but over really if I'm re directing for eg: Psychic Readings over to Love and Relationships because 5 of my staff members are in both categories - the actual delivering of content and in depth of the actual category which skills are provided at different levels don't justify me creating a rel tag from Psychic Readings over to Love and Relationships just because i have 5 staff members listed under both categories. Tell me have I got this right or completely wrong? Here is an eg: Psychic Readings category https://www.zenory.com/psychic-readings And love and relationships category - https://www.zenory.com/love-relationships Hope this makes sense - I really look forward to your guys feedback! Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
301 redirects for 3 top level domains using WP SEO Yoast
Hey Guys I have a custom built website - and a wp blog attached to this - problem is there are 3 top level domains: zenory.co.nz, zenory.com and zenory.com.au **The issue is when I enter the domain to 301 redirect I only have to enter one domain usually i enter redirect from zenory.com/blog/oldpage to zenory.com.newpage ** For eg: I have just move Phone Psychic Readings from the blog - over to the main site. However there seems to be an issue that I'm still having and trying to clean up. I'm finding backlinks there are linking to each other of my 3 domains that end up backlinking across domains, which I was told this can look as spammy to google. For eg: co.nz links many pages to com.au. I'm currently trying to clean this up at the moment - however while im in the process of this - I find myself question when I'm creating the 301 redirects from the blog - but lets say I'm on the blog for zenoy.co.nz/blog/oldblogpost and when I click on a blog post - it redirects me to zenory.com/newarticlepost - because I have redirected it to .com - how can I redirect and make sure is going back to the right domain name to save myself from having to show this cross backlinks? Would gratefully appreciate any assistance on this tricky situation. Cheers Just
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Whether letting an old category just 404 out is OK
Hello, We've got some hidden categories that are still indexed in the search engines. If there are no links to these hidden categories, can we just let them 404 out and be OK SEO wise? We can't 301 redirect them. It's about 50 categories.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
301 Redirect Asp.net Help
Hey, we are redesigning the site and we are changing a lot of urls to make them more SEO friendly But some of the old urls have PR 4-5 What is the best way to do about this? How to do a 301 redirect for specific pages in asp.net Or do you recommend something elsE? Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Madz0 -
All pages going through 302 redirect - bad?
So, our web development company did something I don't agree with and I need a second opinion. Most of our pages are statically cached (the CMS creates .html files), which is required because of our traffic volume. To get geotargeting to work, they've set up every page to 302 redirect to a geodetection script, and back to the geotargeted version of the page. Eg: www.example.com/category 302 redirects to www.example.com/geodetect.hp?ip=ip_address. Then that page 302 redirects back to either www.example.com/category, or www.example.com/geo/category for the geo-targeted version. **So all of our pages - thousands - go through a double 302 redirect. It's fairly invisible to the user, and 302 is more appropriate than 301 in this case, but it really worries me. I've done lots of research and can't find anything specifically saying this is bad, but I can't imagine Google being happy with this. ** Thoughts? Is this bad for SEO? Is there a better way (keeping in mind all of our files are statically generated)? Is this perfectly fine?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dholowiski0 -
Site architecture change - +30,000 404's in GWT
So recently we decided to change the URL structure of our online e-commerce catalogue - to make it easier to maintain in the future. But since the change, we have (partially expected) +30K 404's in GWT - when we did the change, I was doing 301 redirects from our Apache server logs but it's just escalated. Should I be concerned of "plugging" these 404's, by either removing them via URL removal tool or carry on doing 301 redirections? It's quite labour intensive - no incoming links to most of these URL's, so is there any point? Thanks, Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Does 301 redirection will effect my site in the future?
Hello Guys, I am totally new to SEOMOZ.com, when I had issues with my website I asked one of my friend who does SEO he suggested me to implemented 301 redirection approximately 11 months a go, here is the URL of the website http://www.bharatdesi.com/hyderabad . Will Google ban my website from search engine results, what would be the worst scenarios. know there are really good SEO people who follow SEOMOZ everyday... Can any one here please suggest me with some good answers weather I have to remove 301 redirection or I can still keep the same until my home page gets redesigned. I don't really understand all the concepts of SEO, but if some one can help me with the good answers I can ask my developer to the same. Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Vinss0 -
301 Redirect ASP code
Hi I have a script detailed below, that 301 redirects based upon different queries --- """"<%if (Request("offset") = "") Then%> <% if Request("keywords") = "" AND Request("s") <> "" AND Request("j") <> "" then'Sector and Location NOT NULL%> <% if (Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_X_REQUEST_URI")) <> "/" & LCase(SEOFriend(replaces.Fields.Item("JBCategoryLabel"))) & "-jobs-in-" & LCase(SEOFriend(replacej.Fields.Item("JBLocation"))) Then Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently" Response.AddHeader "Location", "/" & LCase(SEOFriend(replaces.Fields.Item("JBCategoryLabel"))) & "-jobs-in-" & LCase(SEOFriend(replacej.Fields.Item("JBLocation"))) Response.End End If %> <%End if%> <% if Request("keywords") = "" AND Request("s") <> "" AND Request("j") = "" then'Sector NOT NULL and Location NULL %> <% if (Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_X_REQUEST_URI")) <> "/" & LCase(SEOFriend(replaces.Fields.Item("JBCategoryLabel"))) & "-jobs-in-" & LCase(SEOFriend(SiteDetails.Fields.Item("JBSRegion"))) Then Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently" Response.AddHeader "Location", "/" & LCase(SEOFriend(replaces.Fields.Item("JBCategoryLabel"))) & "-jobs-in-" & LCase(SEOFriend(SiteDetails.Fields.Item("JBSRegion"))) Response.End End If %> <%End if%> <% if Request("keywords") = "" AND Request("s") = "" AND Request("j") <> "" then'Sector NULL and Location NOT NULL %> <% if (Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_X_REQUEST_URI")) <> "/jobs-in-" & LCase(SEOFriend(replacej.Fields.Item("JBLocation"))) Then Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently" Response.AddHeader "Location", "/jobs-in-" & LCase(SEOFriend(replacej.Fields.Item("JBLocation"))) Response.End End If %> <%End if%> <%End if%>"""" But this still allows for both the www and non www versions of these pages to render in the browser, which is resulting in duplicate content. On my home page I use -- <% If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 Then Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently" Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www." & Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST") & "/" Response.End End if %> `Is there a good way to combine these, so that I still get all of the rules of the first script whilst also redirecting any non www versions to the www version? in other words
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TwoPints
domain.com/jobs-in-" & LCase(SEOFriend(replacej.Fields.Item("JBLocation")))
Eould redirect to
www.domain.com/jobs-in-" & LCase(SEOFriend(replacej.Fields.Item("JBLocation"))) Thanks in advance`0