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
-
302 query - can someone help
If I were to put 302s on several reasonably ranked landing pages to drive more traffic/conversions for a period of one week to a particular page, would the pages with 302s drop from their positions in the SERPS? And is this a bad idea? I want to try and drive some conversions over the next month for a particular page… Thanks for your help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing0 -
Why isn't a 301 redirect removing old style URLs from Google's index?
I have two questions:1 - We changed the URL structure of our site. Old URLs were in the format of kiwiforsale.com/used_fruit/yummy_kiwi. These URLs are 301 redirected to kiwiforsale.com/used-fruit/yummy-kiwi. We are getting duplicate content errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Why isn't the 301 redirect removing the old style URL out of Google's index?2 - I tried to remove the old style URL at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals, however I got the message that "We think the image or web page you're trying to remove hasn't been removed by the site owner. Before Google can remove it from our search results, the site owner needs to take down or update the content."Why are we getting this message? Doesn't the 301 redirect alert Google that the old style URL is toast and it's gone?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Suspicious external links to site have 302 redirects
Hi, I have been asked to look at a site where I suspect some questionable SEO work, particularly link building. The site does seem to be performing very poorly in Google since January 2014, although there are no messages in WMT. Using WMT, OPenSiteExplorer, Majestic & NetPeak, I have analysed inbound links and found a group of links which although are listed in WMT, etc appear to 302 redirect to a directory in China (therefore the actual linking domain is not visible). It looks like a crude type of link farm, but I cant understand why they would use 302s not 301s. The domains are not visible due to redirects. Should I request a disavow or ignore? The linking domains are listed below: http://www.basalts.cn/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | crescentdigital
http://www.chinamarbles.com.cn/
http://www.china-slate.com.cn/
http://www.granitecountertop.com.cn/
http://www.granite-exporter.com/
http://www.sandstones.biz/
http://www.stone-2.com/
http://www.stonebuild.cn/
http://www.stonecompany.com.cn/
http://www.stonecontact.cn/
http://www.stonecrate.com/
http://www.stonedesk.com/
http://www.stonedvd.com/
http://www.stonepark.cn/
http://www.stonetool.com.cn/
http://www.stonewebsite.com/ Thanks Steve0 -
301 redirect a set of pages to one landing page/URL?
I'm planning to redirect the following pages to one new URL/landing page: Old URLs: http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/1 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/2 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/3 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/4 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/5 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/6 New URL: http://www.newdomain.com/new-folder/new-page Code in .htaccess that I will be using: RedirectMatch 301 /folder/page/(.*) http://www.newdomain.com/new-folder/new-page Let me know if this is correct. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
301, 404 or 410? what is the best practice
Hi I'm currently working on a project to correct some really bad practices from years of different SEO's. Basically they had made around 1500 pages of delivery counties and town, only change 3 words on every page. Now apart from duplicate content issues, this has really hammered the site with the latest round of Panda updates. I've pulled the pages, but i'm in several frames of mind on how to best fix this. The pages won't ever be used again, so i'm thinking a 410 code would be best, but reading another post: http://moz.com/community/q/server-redirect-query i'm not sure if i should just let them go to 404's if anyone ever finds them. Incidentally i'm Disavowing over 1100 root domains, so extremely unlikely to find links out there.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eminent1 -
New website :301 redirection of a established domain
Hello , I am launching a new website which would host user generated content . Based on my brandname i have purchased a new domain . In order to improve SEO rankings i was considering to purchase a good quality domain (have gr8 link backs) and then perform 301 redirection of the domain to the new brandname.co.in domain . Does this work ? Is there any harm in doing this ? . Does the Link juice pass naturally ? Warm Rgd
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShoutOut0