Increase 404 errors or 301 redirects?

[Oxfordcomma]

Hi all,

I'm working on an e-commerce site that sells products that may only be available for a certain period of time. Eg. A product may only be selling for 1 year and then be permanently out of stock. When a product goes out of stock, the page is removed from the site regardless of any links it may have gotten over time.

I am trying to figure out the best way to handle these permanently out of stock pages. At the moment, the site is set up to return a 404 page for each of these products. There are currently 600 (and increasing) instances of this appearing on Google Webmasters. I have read that too many 404 errors may have a negative impact on your site, and so thought I might 301 redirect these URLs to a more appropriate page. However I've also read that too many 301 redirects may have a negative impact on your site.

I foresee this to be an issue several years down the road when the site has thousands of expired products which will result in thousands of 404 errors or 301 redirects depending on which route I take.

Which would be the better route? Is there a better solution?

[WesleySmits]

The 301 redirect would be a better option.

I will try to explain why this is better than a 404 page.

1. If people posted a link to the product PageRank to your website.(This is one of the ranking factors in Google) If the page doesn't exist anymore and brings up the 404 page it will lose the value from all the links to that particular product. If you use a 301 redirect to send visitors to a relevant product or to the homepage then the value from those links will have effect on the page where you send them to.

2. Nobody likes a 404 page. There are very cool things you can do with a 404 page so that they are still helpful to the visitor such as most popular pages, a search function and even jokes. But in the end nobody would have clicked on the link or typed in the url to your website and think: Now i want to see his 404 page.

I hope i answered your question. Let me know if anything was unclear.

[tomhall90]

Hi there,

What Wesley said is true to a certain extent. This would probably be the best way to do it (301 Redirect) but as an owner of many eCommerce companies, I'd have to disagree. Mainly on the basis that a "soft 404" would be more generally accepted than just being redirected to the homepage for no explanation to why.

Here's an example, your client is selling TV's online and they're using Magento Enterprise. Let's pretend that they have a TV from Sony, it's a 62" LED SmartTV, Full HD, the works and your client has 200 of these in stock and they're selling them around $/£300 cheaper than the competition. The link gets shared around amongst Facebook, Twitter, HotUkDeals etc.

So let's say after just 7 days, they sell out of this awesome offer... Somebody see's the link late (Facebook, Twitter, etc, it happens) and when they click on that link the website loads but the product doesn't, they just see the homepage. They're going to waste around 15 minutes perhaps searching for that product that you and I both know, doesn't exist anymore.

So what we tend to do, is create a "soft 404" page, which is basically a page apologising for the missing product, explaining that it may be out of stock, temporarily removed from the website etc, but at the same time we will have an array of SIMILAR products that may interest someone who wanted a 62" LED Full HD SmartTV.

I don't know whether I'd say this is a great SEO advantage or a great marketing advantage, but either way, in my personal opinion, I'd say this is a much better option than just pointing the customer/browser to the homepage when they are in search of something specific and don't get a reason to why they're seeing the homepage and not the fantastic offer they've seen!

Hope this answer helps you, even if it's just insightful!

Tom

[MoosaHemani]

If you compare 404pages with 301redirections I believe 301 is a better option and here is why!

When a visitor of your website reach to a page that is no more present on your website, they will find the 404 page which may leads the visitor to bounce from the website as usually 404 pages hurt user experience.

The idea is to 301 them to appropriate pages so that they never see any broken page on the website and can easily perform the desired actions while continuing their journey on the website.

This will also help increasing the time on site which will impact positively on your site nad rankings in search engines.

[Oxfordcomma]

Hi Wesley, thanks for the response. I have no issues with your suggestion, my only concern is the amount of 301 redirection rules that may result of this. Like I said, in several years, the amount of 301 redirection rules can increase to the thousands. I'm afraid this will affect server load & page speed, therefore hurt my site.

[WesleySmits]

That shouldn't hurt your site. I rebuild an e-commerce site which had 50.000 redirects in place at the moment i was working on it. Of course it adds a little bit of load to the server but it's not really noticable. This way you will keep the value of the old links.

Thomas Hall is right about the soft 404 pages being generally more acceptable. If you care more about the user experience then about the value from your old links then you could build a dynamic 404 page.

This page should tell the visitor that the product no longer exist and should give them a couple of products which are similar of relevant to the product they were searching for. This way you will improve the user experience with a soft 404.

Just to be clear, you don't have to set a redirect to the home page. You could also do it to the category pages or to popular products. It's very difficult to say since i don't know which branch your in. Who your target group is and what they are interested in.

[Oxfordcomma]

Thanks Tom. Just want to clarify with you when you use the term "soft 404 page" in your context. You mean an actual page that exists, but basically lets the visitor know that the product is no longer available for various reasons right? Not a soft 404 url error that Google reports on Webmaster Tools.

[tomhall90]

That's right.

A soft 404 is still a missing document, but it allows the user to continue through the pages without leaving the website.

Tom