Strategy for 301s/404s

[HB17]

Hi all,

We receive a feed containing new products every morning, some products are removed and this obviously ends up in Webmaster as a 404.

Is it fine to leave this as a 404 or would 301'ing the link be a better option? If we leave as a 404 we end up with thousands after a couple of month which scares me and makes finding actual 404s more difficult.

Essentially, if lots of pages are being removed everyday, what's the best way of tackling these?

Thanks!

[Alick300]

Hi,

IMO you should create a custom error page for all deleted products and redirect (301) all deleted products to custom 404 error page.

I'm not saying that you should apply 301 every time when product's deleted. Ask Web developer to place such condition in coding that will redirect all deleted products to custom error page.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Redirect to a custom error page, then why not directly provide the error page. It seems a bit overkill to do both.

[cfguti]

Hi,

my approach is a little different:

I'm working with a job board and lots of job post are outdated every day.

I add a noindex tag in order to give google index only relevant pages. Also in these outdated pages we introduce similar job post to drive the user to another relevan job post for him or her.

If I should do a redirect I redirect to the category page but it's a little weird for the user I think.

Hope it helps.

[Houses]

Hi,

Are they products that will come back in stock again soon? If so I would have a page that says it is temporarily out of stock but why not sign up to newsletter that will tell you when it's back in. That way they may still buy the product from you.

I'd also add 'you may also be interested in' products on the page to see if people want to buy something else from you in the meantime.

[HB17]

Thank you for all your suggestions so far!

These exact products won't be back in stock, but there are similar ones we'll be able to link to as a 'this has sold but you may be interested in...'.

At the moment our problem is just keeping track of our 404s - With so many from these products everyday it floods Webmaster and Moz and makes it hard to see any actual 404s we need to deal with.

Ideally we want to keep them indexed, not every products disappears after a day, some stay on for weeks.

Perhaps we could 301 to a custom 404 page which says something like 'sorry this product has sold...' and show others the user may be interested in? This is what one of our competitors are doing.

Thanks!

[LinkWheelOldSchool]

You can redirect to the main category page or just create a custom 404 page (and even show related products on it if your CMS allows it).

[Everett]

If you could just show the 404 error and custom message on the original URL it would save you a redirect. Otherwise, that sounds like a good plan.