404's and Ecommerce - Products no longer for sale

[BeckyKey]

Hi

We regularly have products which are no longer sold and discontinued. As we have such a large site, webmaster tools regularly picks up new 404's.

These 404 pages aren't linked to from anywhere on the site any longer, however WMT will still report them as errors. Does this affect site authority?

Thank you

[DirkC]

It's nothing to worry about - they will disappear after a while (if you don't link to them on your site). It's quite normal to have them & they have no SEO impact (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?hl=en)

You could check this advice from Matt Cuts here: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2334932/ecommerce-seo-tips-for-unavailable-products-from-googles-matt-cutts- for larger sites he advices to use the "unavailable after" metatag (http://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2007/07/robots-exclusion-protocol-now-with-even.html)

Dirk

[BeckyKey]

Hi Dirk,

Great thank you, I don't get any on my site crawls so that's a plus!

[Eric_Rohrback]

What's the thought on using a 410 server response (Gone) for products that won't be in stock on the site anymore? I've seen that strategy work to get pages out of the index. Does anyone have opposition to using that strategy? That would be assuming the page isn't linked to on the site (or other sites for that matter). I've seen that work OK for product pages buried a littler further in the site architecture.

[DirkC]

410 & 404's are treated almost the same way by bots (the 410 just gives a stronger indication that the page is gone forever) - check this article http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-explains-differences-404-410-status-codes-189060 - so a 410 is also a valable option. As most sites already have a custom 404 page I guess the 404 solution is the easiest one;

I forgot to mention in my first reply - but there is also a good article on out-of-stock products on Moz: https://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content

Dirk

[BeckyKey]

Great answers, thank you for the links!