Usage of HTTP Status Code 303

[steffen_]

Hello,

is there anybody who has got some experience with 303 HTTP Status Code?

Our software development would like to use 303 "See Others" instead of 301 for redirecting old product-links to the site-root, instead of showing 404 errors.

What is the best practise for redirecting old product links which are gone in online-shop context?

Best regards

Steffen

[sesertin]

Hello,

Are your products gone forever for sure? If you place 301 or 303 the visitors clicking your pages from the serps will see a new content instead of a 404 eror page that is for sure, so it has its user side benefits. However if you are ranking for these products in google and these words are bringing in traffic to your side i would think twice to delete those pages. I you delete the actual content you are ranking with the useres and the engines will see a totally new content, so if you lose your product specific pages you will also lose your rankings sooner or later.

I would leave those pages but do a little reorganizatin on the landing page. I would push the current content a bit downwords and place a one-two line convincing text why you have finished to sell those products (why users should not serych for them longer) and give an alternate better solution for the product type they are searching. So like we have finished selling lithium batteries as the new xy technique has longer 2x life period, and has half the time to charge. You can look at these astonishing products here

[steffen_]

Hi,

our old content is definitly gone away. We have a lot of volatile content which has got a lifetime from 6-12 month and somtimes shorter. I believe keeping old URLs will blow-up indexed pages.

But my general question was about 303 code. Do you have some experience about the difference between 301/303?

BR

[sesertin]

It probably will not pass your link juice if any. Zhis is the difference: 301 status codes are passing on 90% of the link juice the inbound links are giving to your pages.

For users it is good to redirect them to semothing else. The fact that a products period is over does not mean that it will not be searched anymore. Keeping old pages at least in the sitemap will not blow your pages at all. I would do that, however technically if there are no inbound links pointing to the pages that you want to 303 redirect, it will not hurt your seo.

[tstolber1]

I would recommend using a 301 redirect to the home page as this will pass link juice. If they can be redirected to the specific product category that would be useful.

An alternative would be to still serve up the old page so it results in a 200 code or a 301 to a product suggestion page. Having a products like this suggestion page and or a search for products page would likely convert better than just a blanket 301 redirect to the home page.

Another thing you could do is create an intelligent "catch" page that uses the search parameter (if there is one) or the title of the page referring the site and use that as a parameter for searching your products database and serving up some relevant products.