Handling 404s removing products from ecom site

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[benesmartin]

Hi, I'd recommend to check if those old pages, which are already redirected, have any backlinks. If not, let's just delete the redirects, add "noindex, nofollow" and update robots.txt for not crawling the group of pages. Then redirect the pages you need to delete now with 301. Or, what you can do is, that you setup subdomains for the main categories to spread the amount of redirects. You may loose some domain authority but you'll make more space for the other 301 at the same time.

[Everett]

A jump in 404 errors in and of itself isn't harmful to the site. I'd say as long as they don't KEEP trying to access those URLs you should be OK. Keep an eye out for "soft 404s" as well. And you could also change the status code to a 410, which means the page is permanently GONE, as opposed to just "not found" at the moment.

Here's a flowchart that I hope will help:

http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/444100/Out_Of_Stock_SEO_/Out_Of_Stock_Product_Flowchart.pdf

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