Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
301 vs 410 redirect: What to use when removing a URL from the website
-
We are in the process of detemining how to handle URLs that are completely removed from our website? Think of these as listings that have an expiration date (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/test-prep/tphU3/sat-group-course). What is the best practice for removing these listings (assuming not many people are linking to them externally).
- 301 to a general page (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/search/test-prep)
- Do nothing and leave them up but remove from the site map (as they are no longer useful from a user perspective)
- return a 404 or 410?
-
Hi Alexander,
If not a lot of people are linking to them AND if the page has an expiration date of sorts, you'd probably want to 410 the page.
404 and 410 both tell Google that the page no longer exists; however, the 410 (GONE) is more specific than the 404 (NOT FOUND).
The 410 "should" naturally get the page out of Google's index faster as well.
Or, if it is an ongoing thing, you could consider changing your URL to /group-course and then just constantly change the content on that particular page, letting the URL accumulate inbound links and drive traffic... I don't know exactly how you are using the page, but just an option.
Hope this helps.
Mike
-
404 is a good way to tell Google that a page is gone, which will then help it drop from index. Removing it from a site map won't remove it from index.
If you can't 301 to a good page for a user experience (for example, it'd be jarring to click on a SERP for a bike tire and be 301'd to a page about women's bike shirts) then there's not a lot of value in doing so.
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 Redirect in breadcrumb. How bad is it?
Hi all, How bad is it to have a link in the breadcrumb that 301 redirects? We had to create some hidden category pages in our ecommerce platform bigcommerce to create a display on our category pages in a certain format. Though whilst the category page was set to not visable in bigcommerce admin the URL still showed in the live site bread crumb. SO, we set a 301 redirect on it so it didnt produce a 404. However we have lost a lot of SEO ground the past few months. could this be why? is it bad to have a 301 redirect in the breadrcrumb.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
301 Redirect from query string to new static page
If i want to create a redirect from a page where the slug ends like this "/?i=4839&mid=1000&id=41537" to a static, more SEO friendly slug like "/contact-us/", will a standard 301 redirect suffice? Thanks, Nails
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matt.nails0 -
Should I use noindex or robots to remove pages from the Google index?
I have a Magento site and just realized we have about 800 review pages indexed. The /review directory is disallowed in robots.txt but the pages are still indexed. From my understanding robots means it will not crawl the pages BUT if the pages are still indexed if they are linked from somewhere else. I can add the noindex tag to the review pages but they wont be crawled. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-do-not-use-noindex-in-robots-txt-20873.html Should I remove the robots.txt and add the noindex? Or just add the noindex to what I already have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
SEO impact difference between a URL Rewrite and 301 redirect
Hi guys and girls! Just putting a new site live, we changed the URL from one thing to another and I created a 301 file redirecting the urls like for like. The developer installing it has created a different file with columns like: RewriteRule ^page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^/page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] What's the difference? The page redirects but is there a difference between the 301 redirect and this URL rewrite in terms of SEO and link value?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shloy23-2945840 -
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajarad
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.0 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0 -
How To 301 Redirect .html pages
I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location. I don't know how to do this. All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc. From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file. I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php. I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server. I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0 -
How long is it safe to use a 302 redirect?
Hi All, Lets assume there is site A and site B, both sites are live on the internet today as standalone businesses, but they sell very similar products. Site B has built up some link equity and will eventually become the domain for site A due to an organisational re-brand. For the time being however site A will remain, but site B needs to disappear temporarily, but not lose the link equity which has been built up against it. My current thinking is to 302 redirect site B to site A such that users and search bots accessing site B will be redirected to site A whilst leaving the link equity that exists against site B fully intact and allowing us to continue to grow it should we wish to. The question is, does anybody have a view on how long it is safe to use a 302 temporary redirect for? i.e., is 8-10 months to long. Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BenRush0