Server return 404 and 200 status
-
Dear All,
We have a website where we are showing some products. Many times it happens when we remove any product and add that again later. In our site, we have product list page and detail page. So if any product get deleted and client hits the detail page with deleted product url, then we are returning 404. Next time when that product will be available our server will return 200.I have two questions :
1. Is is right way to deal with deleted product ?
2. After deploying it, we observed that our keywords ranking is going down, is that really affect ?
Thanks,
Om -
Then 404 is the correct way to handle it.
You should also be sure that you clean up any internal links to these pages after they are gone. Search engines can understand other sites linking to pages that are no longer available but they do frown on your own site sending users to missing pages.
-
Hi,
Nice comments. But one thing, since our site have millions of products and may be most of them we wont get back. So in that case, the url already indexed should get removed and should not crawl again. Thats why we were returning 404, so that crawler will understand that url is no more valid.
Thanks,
Om
-
Hi Sunit,
Stephanie Chang wrote a nice blog post about how to handle this situation here on Moz.
She points out there is no right way to do this. I however really like the option to leave the page and content on the site but mark the product page as out of stock, or unavailable right now. I used to run my own e-commerce store and I had many items that were purchased from overseas. At times I could not get an accurate re-stock time from my suppliers due to language and international challenges. My solution was to create and out of stock (email me when available again) notice. I found when those products did come back in stock, that started selling again quickly do to the emails that went out.
The other thing Search Engines don't particularly like content that comes and goes so that may be why you noticed a hit in some pages.
Hope that helps,
Don
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
-
Confused about repeated occurences of URL/essayorg/topic/ showing up as 404 errors in our site logs
Working on a Wordpress website, https://thedoctorwithin.comScanning the site’s 404 errors, I’m seeing a lot of searches for URL/essayorg/topic, coming from Bingbot, as well as other spiders (Google, OpensiteExlorer). We get at least 200 of these irrelevant requests per week. Seems like each topic that follows /essayorg/ is unique. Some include typos: /dissitation/Haven't done a verification to make sure the spiders are who they say they are, yet.Almost seems like there are many links ‘in the wild’ intended for Essay.Org that are being directed towards the site I’m working on.I've considered redirecting any requests for URL/essayorg/ to our sitemap… figuring that might encourage further spidering of actual site content. Is redirection to our sitemap xml file a good idea, or might doing so have unintended consequences? Interested in suggestions about why this might be occurring. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | linkjuiced0 -
Search pages showing up as soft 404 in WMT
Hi ....we are getting allot of "site search" pages showing up in wmt as soft 404's and wanted to know what the best would be to stop this. All search pages are already noindex follow but maybe we should block them in robots txt as well. Would the below help to solve this ? User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | nomad-202323
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search/ Any other suggestions or direction would be appreciated to prevent these pages showing up as soft 404's tks0 -
Best strategy to handle over 100,000 404 errors.
I recently been given a site that has over one-hundred thousand 404 error codes listed in Google Webmasters. It is really odd because according to Google Webmasters, the pages that are linking to these 404 pages are also pages that no longer exist (they are 404 pages themselves). These errors were a result of site migration that had occurred. Appreciate any input on how one might go about auditing and repairing large amounts of 404 errors. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | SEO_Promenade0 -
What is the best way to handle links that lead to a 404 page
Hi Team Moz, I am working through a site cutover with an entirely new URL structure and have a bunch of pages that could not, would not or just plain don't redirect to new pages. Steps I have taken: Multiple new sitemaps submitted with new URLs and the indexing looks solid used webmasters to remove urls with natural result listings that did not redirect and produce urls Completely built out new ppc campaigns with new URL structures contacted few major link partners Now here is my question: I have a pages that produce 404s that are linked to in forums, slick deals and stuff like that which will not be redirected. Is disavowing these links the correct thing to do?
Technical SEO | | mm9161570 -
Google's "cache:" operator is returning a 404 error.
I'm doing the "cache:" operator on one of my sites and Google is returning a 404 error. I've swapped out the domain with another and it works fine. Has anyone seen this before? I'm wondering if G is crawling the site now? Thx!
Technical SEO | | AZWebWorks0 -
Name Servers & SEO
We have decided to create a few blogs and will eventually be linking to some of our clients. I have domain privacy and different class C addresses for each of my domains. But the name servers area all the same. Ex: If we create an article for one client on all 5 blogs, will the name servers be a problem?
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Moved to a New Server IP Address
Hi, I just upgraded everything, a much faster server. I have significantly improved page load times. I have 2 questions 1. I also upgraded my blog which is a component of the site. I could NOT redirect post-for-post so made single 301 redirect from all pages from the old blog to the root of new blog. I did not care about the old blog, the posts are irrelevant now. Will the massive redirects be a problem? 2. I had some DNS issues and other problems that took me about 24 hours to fix during the transition. The site is up an fully operational. Will I be penalized? If so, how long Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Bucky0 -
301 on ALL 404 for Pagerank Recovery, bad idea?
Its a bad idea to do a 301 to the home page of the site on all 404 pages as a way of pagerank recovery? If so, why? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Bligoo0