Server return 404 and 200 status

[omverma]

Dear All,
               We have a website where we are showing some products. Many times it happens when we remove any product and add that again later. In our site, we have product list page and detail page. So if any product get deleted and client hits the detail page with deleted product url, then we are returning 404. Next time when that product will be available our server will return 200.

I have two questions :

1. Is is right way to deal with deleted product ?

2. After deploying it, we observed that our keywords ranking is going down, is that really affect ?

Thanks,
Om

[donford]

Hi Sunit,

Stephanie Chang wrote a nice blog post about how to handle this situation here on Moz.

She points out there is no right way to do this. I however really like the option to leave the page and content on the site but mark the product page as out of stock, or unavailable right now. I used to run my own e-commerce store and I had many items that were purchased from overseas. At times I could not get an accurate re-stock time from my suppliers due to language and international challenges. My solution was to create and out of stock (email me when available again) notice. I found when those products did come back in stock, that started selling again quickly do to the emails that went out.

The other thing Search Engines don't particularly like content that comes and goes so that may be why you noticed a hit in some pages.

Hope that helps,

Don

[omverma]

Hi,

Nice comments. But one thing, since our site have millions of products and may be most of them we wont get back. So in that case, the url already indexed should get removed and should not crawl again. Thats why we were returning 404, so that crawler will understand that url is no more valid.

Thanks,

Om

[donford]

Then 404 is the correct way to handle it.

You should also be sure that you clean up any internal links to these pages after they are gone. Search engines can understand other sites linking to pages that are no longer available but they do frown on your own site sending users to missing pages.