301 redirect all 404 pages

[iThinkMedia]

Hi I would like to have a second opinion on this. I am working on an ecommerce website that they 301 redirect all 404 pages (including the URLs entered incorrectly) to the “All categories page”. Will this have any negative SEO impact?

[TomRayner]

It shouldn't but I'd consider a more specific approach.

Would it be possible to redirect URLs to more specific (and appropriate) landing pages? It might limit any interruption to the user journey.

Also, how many URLs are we talking about here? If we're talking hundreds of thousands (seen it happen with some CMS), redirecting them all via .htaccess might slow down the speed of your site, slightly.  Google does take site speed into account for SEO, so be wary of this - although this will only be a problem if you're redirecting an absolute truckload of URLs.

Other than that, it's generally good practice to 301 404s, so I'd go ahead with it.

[alsvik]

Customer: Can i buy a pair of red trousers?

404: Sorry. We dont have any.

301: Sorry. We dont have any red trousers. But maybe these blue trousers would look great on you?

---

What you are doing is interrupting your customer. Consider that the way the customer enters your store, has a purpose. If the customer used the link www.store.com/trousers - they expect trousers on the page:

Customer: Can i  ...

301: Welcome customer. Take a look around and see if you can find what you're looking for.

• you should definitely be more specific. 301 requests to pages regarding trousers to your trousers-category, and 301 redirects request to pages regarding boots to your boots category.

[iThinkMedia]

Thanks for all your responses :).  My main concern here is 301 redirecting mistyped/ incorrectly entered URL s to the “All categories” page rather than returning a custom 404 page. Will this be problematic for SEO???

[alsvik]

So you mean a customer types in /troussers and you would like to redirect that request to /trousers ?

That will no be a problem to SEO, hence google does not know the /troussers-page.

You can not get in SEO-trouble for redirecting pages that are not indexed.

I would say that if you get a lot of 404's because the customer mistyped your url - and it is not traffic from an other page/domain where there is a mistyped link - there is no problem!

[irvingw]

"My main concern here is 301 redirecting mistyped/ incorrectly entered URL s to the “All categories” page rather than returning a custom 404 page. Will this be problematic for SEO???"

Yes that is bad for SEO do not do that - non existent pages need to 404 and not 301. Even some pages that used to exist might make sense to 404 if they have no links pointing to them and no relevant new category section to 301 them to.

[MikeRoberts]

If people are only occasionally typing in "/troussers" instead of "/trousers" then let it 404. Its there to let people know "I'm sorry, this isn't here. Perhaps you misspelled something." You could always 301 it if you really felt like it because it wouldn't hurt anything in the long run.

Now, if you found that you're sending 500 people a day to a 404 page for "/troussers" when they're looking for "/trousers" and you find there are relevant inlinks pointing at the wrong page then by all means go and 301 those people to the correct page. They'll be better served by it. But if you're redirecting all of those people to "All Categories" then you aren't being thoughtful of the customer's needs.

Indiscriminately 301ing everyone to "All Categories" without considering what their intentions are is not helping that customer and will likely wind up with an ever increasing bounce rate on "All Categories".

[alsvik]

Yes - indeed. The 301 need to be relevant. You can not redirect www.domain.com/red-pantss to www.domain.com/blue-sweaters

/red-pantss --> /pants or even better /red-pants