301, 302, 404 or 410

[tomcox]

Hello,

We have an ecommerce site and it's very normal for products to be discontinued by the manufacturer.  We used to leave the pages up to keep the content and link equity.  Now we feel this is misleading for the customer and we have started to remove pages for discontinued items.  Customers trying to reach these pages get a nice Product Not Found page with an explanation and links to categories.  The shopping cart sends a 302 code.

Google Webmaster Tools was complaining about "soft 404's" and apparently didn't like this.  We tried changing to a 404 return code but couldn't get the nice Product Not Found page to display.  Plus, GWT and SEOmoz started to complain about 404 errors.

I think we've reached a solution where we can send a 301 and still display the desired Product Not Found page.  This might be the best solution.  We'll see if we get errors from SEOmoz or GWT.  However, a 410 return code would probably be most correct but we'd like to salvage any link equity we can but we really want to be "good citizens" and do things right.

Should we really be sending a 410 in this case even if we lose seo equity or are we OK with the 301 and the nice information page?

Thanks,

Tom

[David_ODonnell]

410 will kill the link equity. In cases similar to yours, I have implemented a 301 to the category page of the product removed. This gives users products similar to the one they were looking for, and retains link equity.

[Saijo.George]

I agree with David

[MoosaHemani]

The best idea is to 301 to removed product’s category page or a custom page that explains why the page does not exist anymore what are the ideal paces on the website to go and find similar products....

[MickEdwards]

I agree with David and Moosa.

Redirect to the category page if it is genuinely useful for your visitor.  So in some cases you might want to put user experience above retaining link juice within that category and either redirect elsewhere or create a custom page.