How to handle pages with no information at the moment, but are not 404?

[qurve]

As people who may have seen my past questions know, I run a small website which acts as a business/review directory for local businesses in a specific niche. Right now every business has a page on a url such as:

http://site.com/businesses/business-name

which shows the top 5 reviews with a link to the full review list which is located at:

http://site.com/businesses/business-name/reviews

The problem(?) I have is that even for a business with 0 reviews, the latter URL is available and responds with a 200 status code, but ultimately just says "There aren't any" which results in search terms for "business name reviews" often leading to these dead-end pages when I would rather have them land on the business page itself.

How is everyone handling URLs? Until the business has has reviews, this URL is useless, but it is a completely valid URL.

Some ideas I've had are in order of what I think is best to worst:

1. Return 200, but with a meta 'noindex' tag if the business has no reviews at the time requested
2. Return 404 if the business has no reviews at the time requested
3. Return 302 back to the main business page if the business has no reviews at the time requested

Anyone have any better ideas than above for how to handle this situation? One other option is to completely get rid of the full review list and rework the main business profile page, but that would obviously require a lot more development. I'm looking for the best option in the meantime.

Thanks in advance for your insight.

[sesertin]

Hello Daniel,

I would not represent 404 as that indicates a broken url to the search engine and it won't know why.

i would not use noindex as the page should still forward pagerank however it has no content.

I think when there are not any reviews I would simply add some more text to "There aren't any" like "There are not any reviews yet, you can look XY business details here, or you may check back at a later time. If you have your opinion feel free to add the first review yourself".

"Xy business details" can be a link to business detail page, so there is some anchor value carried. The page still has the ability to rank in google an to be found if you search xy business reviews. From engine perspective this is bettter than redirecting or 404, and still makes sense from user perspective as you offer them opporunities to get engaged with your page. Maybe I would do it that way.