What should I do with a large number of 'pages not found'?

[CuriousCatDigital]

One of my client sites lists millions of products and 100s or 1000s are de-listed from their inventory each month and removed from the site (no longer for sale). What is the best way to handle these pages/URLs from an SEO perspective? There is no place to use a 301.

1. Should we implement 404s for each one and put up with the growing number of 'pages not found' shown in Webmaster Tools?

2. Should we add them to the Robots.txt file?

3. Should we add 'nofollow' into all these pages?

Or is there a better solution?

Would love some help with this!

[Kingof5]

Why aren't 301s an option?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Claire,

If you really can't 301, consider serving a page providing alternative products, a search function and an explanation of why the page's former content is no longer available. Many estate websites are quite good at this. Using real estate as an example, some maintain the URLs of properties that regularly go on the market (big city apartments, for example) but grey out the information to show a user that the property is not currently for lease. Other URLs will show properties in the former listing's post code.

Your robots.txt file is going to get out of control if you are having to add millions of pages to it on a regular basis, so I would personally not pursue that route.

[LesleyPaone]

I always take notes from giants on how to handle things like this. Amazon is the giant in this arena, what do they do? They do not disable the product, they leave it on the site as unavailable. I would do the same thing personally. What platform are you using, does it have a suggested products module / plugin? If so, it can be modified to be more promient on pages that are disabled from selling. But I would keep the page and keep the authority of the page.

If you 301 it to another product, the search satisfaction level goes down and your bounce rate will rise. I would be careful with this, because Google wants to serve results that are relevant and what people are looking for.

The other option I would give is to return a 410 status code to get them de-indexed.

[CuriousCatDigital]

Thanks Jane and Lesley for your responses. Great ideas from you both. I think I'll keep the pages but change the content/buying options, as you've both suggested.

I had considered 410s and might fall back on this for historical URLs in the instance that we can no longer retrieve the content.

[HillyCE]

I would leave the pages up but mark them as "no follow". When I worked in eCommerce, this was a great tactic. For UX purposes, you could try to steer people to similar-products, but keep the originating page as "no follow" or "no index".