Temporary Redirect - on nonexistant URL

[spkcp111]

I'm getting a Temporary Redirect issue on

|

http://www.luckygemstones.com/botswana-legends.htm

http://www.luckygemstones.com/botswana-legends.htm | http://www.luckygemstones.com/page-not-found.htm | 1 | 0 | 302 |

YET! There is no such page on my site. I believe I had one once, but has been corrected for a while now.

WHY is SEOMOZ picking this up as an error and how can I fix?

Kathleen

http://www.luckygemstones.com

[Bryan_Loconto]

Did you do a 301 redirect from the old page to the new one? If you had an old page that you redirect you should use a 301 redirect to pass the link juice (authority and users) from the old page to the new.

Otherwise, you lose the authority of the page and the search engines return a 404.

[mememax]

if you look for your page in google (botswana-legends site:luckygemstones.com) you'll find ranking #1 the page you've just sent.

Probably it was an old URL but using a 302 instead of a 404 it won't help you much on getting rid of it from google index.

If you're strategy is to send to the user a 404 send a real 404 header, if you've changed that url to a new one you'll want to set up a 301 to the new page just to not lose the old seo efforts made in the old page.

[spkcp111]

I probably had the incorrect page there for a short while--it should've been called botswana-agate-legends.htm.

So should I put a < link rel=canonical href="botswana-legends.htm"> in the CORRECT page (botswana-agate-legends.htm)? Or should I put up the OLD, incorrect page back up and put a NOINDEX and a < link rel tag pointing to the correct page (botswana-agate-legends.htm)?

So confusing and so unreal that one mistake would cause such issues.

Another option? Wait for google to hash it out and lose the link juice for a while?

Kathleen

[Bryan_Loconto]

Only use a link canonical for two pages with similar content to avoid duplication and let the search engine know "this content is all the same but I want to rank this page"

Do a 301 redirect from the old page to the new page if you have a new page to deliver. If not build a 404 landing page with call to action for that user.

I hope this helps.

[mememax]

as Bryan said, use canonical only if there are two identical pages with the same content live at the same time. If not (and this is the case) you should return a 404 to have it noindexed in a while or 301 it to the new one if you're still receiving traffic/links there, so the users/bot would understand the page has moved.