How to switch from URL based navigation to Ajax, 1000's of URLs gone

[JeremyICC]

Hi everyone,

We have thousands of urls generated by numerous products filters on our ecommerce site, eg./category1/category11/brand/color-red/size-xl+xxl/price-cheap/in-stock/.

We are thinking of moving these filters to ajax in order to offer a better user experience and get rid of these useless urls.

In your opinion, what is the best way to deal with this huge move ?

1. leave the existing URLs respond as before : as they will disappear from our sitemap (they won't be linked anymore), I imagine robots will someday consider them as obsolete ?

2. redirect permanent (301) to the closest existing url

3. mark them as gone (4xx)

I'd vote for option 2. Bots will suddenly see thousands of 301, but this is reflecting what is really happening, right ? Do you think this could result in some penalty ?

Thank you very much for your help.

Jeremy

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

If I understand your situation correctly - now filters for products have actual urls and you want to use filters with ajax on the same url - then yes, just do redirects. However, you can't do redirect to ajax filter, so you'd be redirecting to categories, I guess. 4xx surely is not the way to go, as well as option 1 you suggesting, since it would result in 404s.

Maybe canonical links could help - not sure though. I say go with 301s.

[JeremyICC]

Thank you Dimitri, we fully agree with your proposal !