Thanks Mike.

Your initial solution would be preferred, but its not scalable. We are talking about over 100 websites with varying levels of inventory.

I was thinking along the lines of the keeping the 404 or 410 status. It was just odd when the vendor proposed a 422 error, when its not a preferred option in Google's support pages. I was just wondering if anyone used the 422 response code before and if so, why.

We work with an automotive industry platform provider and whenever a vehicle is removed from inventory, a 404 error is returned. Being that inventory moves so quickly, we have a host of 404 errors in search console.

The fix that the platform provider proposed was to return a 422 status code vs a 404. I'm not familiar with how a 422 may impact our optimization efforts. Is this a good approach, since there is no scalable way to 301 redirect all of those dead inventory pages.

Thanks for the responses.

These changes will be managed by the developers, so it won't impact any other priorities that I have in the queue. My concern was whether this was pressing enough that I would have to push the developer towards a hard timeline vs a more phased one. I took a look at other clients on this platform and saw the same errors. So, this may be a platform wide markup error.

These are automotive clients, so their sites are OEM mandated. Therefore, I don't have any say in the types of markup they use. But, my goal is to impress upon them the fact that these errors could definitely negatively impact my clients (if not now, in the future).

Greetings All...

I've been digging through the search console on a few of my sites and I've been noticing quite a few structured data errors. Most of the errors are related to: hcard, hentry and hatom. Most of them are missing author & entry-title, while the other one is  missing: fn.

I recently saw an article on SEL about Google's focus on spammy mark-up. The sites I use are built and managed by vendors, so I would have to impress upon them the impact of these errors and have them prioritize, then fix them.

My question is whether or not this should be prioritized? Should I have them correct these errors sooner than later or can I take a phased approach? I haven't noticed any loss in traffic or anything like that, I'm more focused on what negative impact a "phased approach" could have.

Any thoughts?

I have an automotive dealer as a client. The primary nav has a finance menu item, which (of course) points to the finance related pages. He just requested that I add a finance link item, as child menu items, under the new and used car nav items.

Now, this is wrong for a host of reasons, what is the best way to communicate to this to him? I mean, I see this as a usability issue, it's wrong thematically, we would end up having 3 links pointing to the same page. Would this classify as dupe content?