What should I do with a large number of 'pages not found'?
-
One of my client sites lists millions of products and 100s or 1000s are de-listed from their inventory each month and removed from the site (no longer for sale). What is the best way to handle these pages/URLs from an SEO perspective? There is no place to use a 301.
1. Should we implement 404s for each one and put up with the growing number of 'pages not found' shown in Webmaster Tools?
2. Should we add them to the Robots.txt file?
3. Should we add 'nofollow' into all these pages?
Or is there a better solution?
Would love some help with this!
-
I would leave the pages up but mark them as "no follow". When I worked in eCommerce, this was a great tactic. For UX purposes, you could try to steer people to similar-products, but keep the originating page as "no follow" or "no index".
-
Thanks Jane and Lesley for your responses. Great ideas from you both. I think I'll keep the pages but change the content/buying options, as you've both suggested.
I had considered 410s and might fall back on this for historical URLs in the instance that we can no longer retrieve the content.
-
I always take notes from giants on how to handle things like this. Amazon is the giant in this arena, what do they do? They do not disable the product, they leave it on the site as unavailable. I would do the same thing personally. What platform are you using, does it have a suggested products module / plugin? If so, it can be modified to be more promient on pages that are disabled from selling. But I would keep the page and keep the authority of the page.
If you 301 it to another product, the search satisfaction level goes down and your bounce rate will rise. I would be careful with this, because Google wants to serve results that are relevant and what people are looking for.
The other option I would give is to return a 410 status code to get them de-indexed.
-
Hi Claire,
If you really can't 301, consider serving a page providing alternative products, a search function and an explanation of why the page's former content is no longer available. Many estate websites are quite good at this. Using real estate as an example, some maintain the URLs of properties that regularly go on the market (big city apartments, for example) but grey out the information to show a user that the property is not currently for lease. Other URLs will show properties in the former listing's post code.
Your robots.txt file is going to get out of control if you are having to add millions of pages to it on a regular basis, so I would personally not pursue that route.
-
Why aren't 301s an option?
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
-
Pages not indexed
Hey everyone Despite doing the necessary checks, we have this problem that only a part of the sitemap is indexed.
Technical SEO | | conversal
We don't understand why this indexation doesn't want to take place. The major problem is that only a part of the sitemap is indexed. For a client we have several projects on the website with several subpages, but only a few of these subpages are indexed. Each project has 5 to 6 subpages. They all should be indexed. Project: https://www.brody.be/nl/nieuwbouwprojecten/nieuwbouw-eeklo/te-koop-eeklo/ Mainly subelements of the page are indexed: https://www.google.be/search?source=hp&ei=gZT1Wv2ANouX6ASC5K-4Bw&q=site%3Abrody.be%2Fnl%2Fnieuwbouwprojecten%2Fnieuwbouw-eeklo%2F&oq=site%3Abrody.be%2Fnl%2Fnieuwbouwprojecten%2Fnieuwbouw-eeklo%2F&gs_l=psy-ab.3...30.11088.0.11726.16.13.1.0.0.0.170.1112.8j3.11.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..4.6.693.0..0j0i131k1.0.p6DjqM3iJY0 Do you have any idea what is going wrong here?
Thanks for your advice! Frederik
Digital marketeer at Conversal0 -
Is it easier to rank high with a front page than a landing page?
My product is laptop and of cause, I like to rank high for the keyword "laptop". Do any of you know if the search engines tends to rank a front page higher than a landing page? Eg. www.brand.com vs. www.brand.com/laptop
Technical SEO | | Debitoor0 -
On-Page Problem
Hello Mozzers, A friend has a business website and the on-page stuff is done really bad. He wants to rank for: conference room furnishing, video conference, digital signage. (Don't worry about the keywords, it's just made up for an example.) For these three services he has a page: hiswebsite.com/av AV stands for audio and video and is the h1. If you click on one of the service, the url doesn't change. Like if you click on video conference, just the text changes, the url stays /av. All his targeted pages got an F Grade, I am not surprised, the services titles are in . Wouldn't it be a lot better to make an own page for every service with a targeted keyword, like hiswebsite.com/video-conference All this stuff is on /av, how will a 301 resirect work to all the service pages, does this make sense? Any help is appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | grobro1 -
Why can't I redirect 302 errors to 301's?
I've been advised by IT that due to the structure of our website (they don't use sub-folders) it's not possible to change 302's to 301's. Is this correct, or am I being fobbed off?
Technical SEO | | lindsaytuerena0 -
Why is the Page Authority of my product pages so low?
My domain authority is 35 (homepage Page Authority = 45) and my website has been up for years: www.rainchainsdirect.com Most random pages on my site (like this one) have a Page Authority of around 20. However, as a whole, the individual pages of my products rank exceptionally low. Like these: http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/products/copper-channel-link-rain-chain (Page Authority = 1) http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/todays-deals/products/contempo-chain (Page Authority = 1) I was thinking that for whatever reason they have such low authority, that it may explain why these pages rank lower in google for specific searches using my exact product name (in other words, other sites that are piggybacking of my unique products are ranking higher for my product in a specific name search than the original product itself on my site) In any event, I'm trying to get some perspective on why these pages remain with the same non-existent Page Authority. Can anyone help to shed some light on why and what can be done about it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | csblev0 -
Error: Missing Meta Description Tag on pages I can't find in order to correct
This seems silly, but I have errors on blog URLs in our WordPress site that I don't know how to access because they are not in our Dashboard. We are using All in One SEO. The errors are for blog archive dates, authors and just simply 'blog'. Here are samples: http://www.fateyes.com/2012/10/
Technical SEO | | gfiedel
http://www.fateyes.com/author/gina-fiedel/
http://www.fateyes.com/blog/ Does anyone know how to input descriptions for pages like these?
Thanks!!0 -
Splitting Page Authority with two URLs for the same page.
Hello guys, My website is currently holding two different URLs for the same page and I am under the impression such set up is dividing my Page Authority and Link Juice. We currently have the following page with both URLs below: www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/home.aspx
Technical SEO | | JoaoPdaCosta-WBR
www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/ Analysing the page authority and backlinks I identified that we are splitting the amount of backlinks (links from sites, social media and therefore authority). "/home.aspx"
PA: 67
Linking Root Domains: 52
Total Links: 272 "/"
PA: 64
Linking Root Domains: 29
Total Links: 128 I am under the impression that if the URLs were the same we would maximise our backlinks and therefore page authority. My Question: How can I fix this? Should I have a 301 redirect from the page "/" to the "/home.aspx" therefore passing the authority and link juice of “/” directly to “/homes.aspx”? Trying to gather thoughts and ideas on this, suggestions are much appreciated? Thanks!0 -
How do I 301 redirect a number of pages to one page
I want to redirect all pages in /folder_A /folder_B to /folder_A/index.php. Can I just write one or two lines of code to .htaccess to do that?
Technical SEO | | Heydarian0