410 /demandware.store/ pages

[bdcseo]

I have a client that just migrated to salesforce commerce cloud. They have a large amount of 410 pages showing up in site crawls. They are all of the /on/demandware.store/ variety. Is there any reason to redirect thousands of these pages? Any value? Or should they be allowed to drop off?

[Everett]

BDCSEO,

That really depends on if those URLs are still getting traffic and/or have any backlinks. I would do a complete export of all of the backlinks to that domain and look for any going into those pages. That should tell you if you need to redirect any of them.

[bdcseo]

There's been a significant drop in organic since site migration.

[Everett]

BDCSEO,

That is not at all uncommon. If the migration was done well it "should" bounce back within a few weeks. A sustained traffic loss usually means something was missed, like losing link equity from legacy redirects that weren't ported over, similar to the issue above.

[bdcseo]

I wasnt in on the mapping of the 301's but it LOOKS like all was correct. Just thousands of 410's still out that. And submitted on the site map, which I think aint helping.

[Everett]

Yes, your sitemap should be clean of anything other than a 200 (ok) status code.

If you are getting thousands of 410's then the URL mapping must not be correct. Otherwise, they'd be 301s. Export all of those URLs returning a 410 status code and pull in metrics for them from Google Search Console, Analytics, and for backlinks (Moz, aHref, SEMRush...). Did any of them get more than a few visitors in the 90 days prior to the migration? Did any of those result in sales? Do any of them have backlinks?

[bdcseo]

There were several that had good traffic and sales pre-migration.