Any downsides of (permanent)redirecting 404 pages to more generic pages(category page)
-
Hi,
We have a site which is somewhat like e-bay, they have several categories and advertisements posted by customers/ client. These advertisements disappear over time and turn into 404 pages. We have the option to redirect the user to the corresponding category page, but we're afraid of any negative impact of this change. Are there any downsides, and is this really the best option we have?
Thanks in advance!
-
This is definitely the best thing to do. Whenever a page goes to a 404 you should be consider a redirect of some sort. I would take into consideration user experience when you're doing your redirects as a priority.
In general, when I work with e-commerce website, I will 301 redirect old product pages (now 404 pages) through to the main category pages. This provides a good user experience and any links that were pointing to that product page can be flowed into the category page (you'll be surprised how much traffic you lose from not doing this).
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
-
Site move-Redirecting and Indexing dynamic pages
I have an interesting problem I would like to pick someone else’s brain. Our business has over 80 different products, each with a dedicated page (specs, gallery, copy etc.) on the main website. Main site itself, is used for presentation purpose only and doesn’t offer a direct path to purchase. A few years ago, to serve a specific customer segment, we have created a site where customers can perform a quick purchase via one of our major strategic partners. Now we are looking to migrate this old legacy service, site and all its pages under the new umbrella (main domain/CMS). Problem #1 Redirects/ relevancy/ SEO equity Ideally, we could simply perform 1:1 - 301 redirect from old legacy product pages to the relevant new site products pages. The problem is that Call to action (buy), some images and in some cases, parts of the copy must be changed to some degree to accommodate this segment. The second problem is in our dev and creative team. There are not enough resources to dedicate for the creation of the new pages so we can perform 1:1 301 redirects. So, the potential decision is to redirect a visitor to the dynamic page URL where parent product page will be used to apply personalization rules and a new page with dynamic content (buy button, different gallery etc.) is displayed to the user (see attached diagram). If we redirect directly to parent URL and then apply personalization rules, URL will stay the same and this is what we are trying to avoid (we must mention in the URL that user is on purchase path, otherwise this redirect and page where the user lands, can be seen as deceptive). Also Dynamic pages will have static URLs and unique page/title tag and meta description. Problem #2 : Indexation/Canonicalization The dynamic page is canonicalized to the parent page and does have nearly identical content/look and feel, but both serve a different purpose and we want both indexed in search. Hope my explanation is clear and someone can chip in. Any input is greatly appreciated! vCm2Dt.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin1 -
Several 301 Redirects to Same Page
Hi, I have 3 Pages we won't use anymore in our website. Let's call them url A, url B and url C. To keep their SEO strength on our domain, I've though about redirecting all of them to url D. For what I understand, when 301 redirecting, about 85-90% of the link SEO juice is passed. Then, if I redirect 3 URLs to the same page... does url D receive all the link SEO juices for URLs added up? (approximately)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
e.g. future url D juice = 100% current url D juice + 85% url A juice + 85% url B juice + 85% url C juice Is this the best practice, or is there a better way? Cheers,0 -
A/B Testing - Should I add product descriptions on my category landing pages as well as on product pages and if so . how to do this to avoid duplicate content
Hi All, I recently relaunched a new design on my tool hire eCommerce website and now display my products in grid form on my category landing pages as opposed to just a list view which we previously had on the old design. My bounce rates are alot higher than they use to be and my gut instinct is telling me maybe this is wrong . I want to do some a/b testing using a list view. My question is , previously in our list views we just showed the images and pricing and had on page content on the bottom of the page. The user would click on the product image and they would then we taken to the product page which has the product description , t&c, etc etc.. If I was to do this in my a/b testing but change it so we also displayed the product descriptions as well on the category landing pages . Is there a special way to do this as in effect, we would have duplicate content as the product descriptions are also on the product page?. Does anyone have any thoughts on this as to whether its a No No from an SEO point of view ?... Heres a short url link to one of my category pages - http://goo.gl/QJv5gw Historically we use to rank well for the category landing pages and not for the product pages.Our Rankings are down , bounce rates are higher so I am trying to sort both. We have good content on pages etc. Any advice greatly appreciated as always thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
Redirect help
I work for a company that has a domain that is something like www.neat-stuff.com but most people just use www.neatstuff.com without the dash. The redirect for the homepage works fine. We recently launched a new site and if you use www.neat-stuff.com/category it redirects from the old site to the new site just fine. However if you use www.neatstuff.com/category it does not properly redirect to www.neat-stuff.com/category. How do I fix that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Duplicate Page Title/Content Issues on Product Review Submission Pages
Hi Everyone, I'm very green to SEO. I have a Volusion-based storefront and recently decided to dedicate more time and effort into improving my online presence. Admittedly, I'm mostly a lurker in the Q&A forum but I couldn't find any pre-existing info regarding my situation. It could be out there. But again, I'm a noob... So, in my recent SEOmoz report I noticed that over 1,000 Duplicate Content Errors and Duplicate Page Title Errors have been found since my last crawl. I can see that every error is tied to a product in my inventory - specifically each product page has an option to write a review. It looks like the subsequent page where a visitor can fill out their review is the stem of the problem. All of my products are shown to have the same issue: Duplicate Page Title - Review:New Duplicate Page Content - the form is already partially filled out with the corresponding product My first question - It makes sense that a page containing a submission form would have the same title and content. But why is it being indexed, or crawled (or both for that matter) under every parameter in which it could be accessed (product A, B, C, etc)? My second question (an obvious one) - What can I do to begin to resolve this? As far as I know, I haven't touched this option included in Volusion other than to simply implement it. If I'm missing any key information, please point me in the right direction and I'll respond with any additional relevant information on my end. Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DakotahW0 -
Does having multiple links to the same page influence the Link juice this page is able to pass
Say you have a page and it has 4 outgoing links to the same internal page. In the original Pagerank algo if these links were links to an page outside your own domain, this would mean that the linkjuice this page is able to pass would be devided by 4. The thing is i'm not sure if this is also the case when the outgoing link, is linking to a page on your own domain. I would say that outgoing links (whatever the destination) will use some of your link juice, so it would be better to have 1 outgoing link instead of 4 to the same destination, the the destination will profit more form that link. What are you're thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TjeerdvZ0 -
Category Pages - Canonical, Robots.txt, Changing Page Attributes
A site has category pages as such: www.domain.com/category.html, www.domain.com/category-page2.html, etc... This is producing duplicate meta descriptions (page titles have page numbers in them so they are not duplicate). Below are the options that we've been thinking about: a. Keep meta descriptions the same except for adding a page number (this would keep internal juice flowing to products that are listed on subsequent pages). All pages have unique product listings. b. Use canonical tags on subsequent pages and point them back to the main category page. c. Robots.txt on subsequent pages. d. ? Options b and c will orphan or french fry some of our product pages. Any help on this would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Troyville0