301 Redirect and Webmaster Central

[spkcp111]

I've been working on removing canonical issues. My host is Apache.

Is this the correct code for my htaccess?

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^luckygemstones.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L]

SECOND!!! I have two websites under Google's Webmaster Central;

http://luckygemstones.com which gets NO 404 soft errors...

AND

http://www.luckygemstones.com which has 247 soft 404 errors...

I think I should DELETE the http://luckygemstones.com site from Webmaster Central--the 301 redirect handles the"www" thing.

Is this correct? I hate to hose things (even worse?)

Help!

Kathleen

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Correct code for .htaccess.

I wouldn't remove the non-www version from GWT. Instead, set the preferred domain (configuration > settings > preferred domain > Display URLs as www.luckygemstones.com)

In addition, I would add rel canonical tags to the www. version of each page.

Can you list some sample soft 404s? By definition, they are pages that aren't found but return a 200 response code.

[spkcp111]

So I still need the link rel tag on each page--including the 301 redirect?

So say or would the link tag require the www? I think not--but not totally clear!

We're a jewelry website--and things do sell out, so we remove the page (otherwise someone might try to order them) I have it in the sitemap to archive the pages yet still get 404 errors. I've been considering 410--but not sure how to implement...

We have literally thousands of items--so it'd be a bit of work to go over and manually remove sold out items at google every day. And what about yahoo/bing, etc?

I wonder how people handle sold outs properly.

Thx for your help!

Kathleen

[OlegKorneitchouk]

http://www.luckygemstones.com/anypage.htm" />

Yes, add the www. because that is what you want to be indexed.. you want the non-www version to be ignored and replaced with the www. version.

I wonder how people handle sold outs properly. - Keep the page and replace the "add to cart/buy now" button with a "Sold Out" graphic.

That way you get to keep all your pages (hopefully they are unique and get external links) and are able to target more keywords to cross sell your other items. And if you do get more of the item in stock, you can just add the payment buttons again.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Hah, reading my daily dose of news and this came up.

"If we've seen a URL once, we're likely to retry it again and again, especially if we should run across new links to that URL. This isn't something that you really need to worry about, it's absolutely fine and even expected that a website returns 404 for URLs that don't exist. Assuming these are URLs that you don't want to have indexed, then these 404 errors will not negatively affect your site's performance in search. Having 404s is fine." - John Mueller

[spkcp111]

It seems like Google would want unused/unwanted pages removed--less "junk" on the web--less irrelevance to add to their already huge index...

A long time problem I think...I will sometimes put NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW in pages I wanted removed from the index--then after a few months, delete them.

Thanks for the feedback!