What to do with temporary empty pages?

[marcuslind90]

I have a website listing real estate in different areas that are for sale. In small villages, towns, and areas, sometimes there is nothing for sale and therefore the page is completely empty with no content except a

and some footer text.

I have thousand of landing pages for different areas. For example "Apartments in Tibro" or "Houses in Ljusdahl" and Moz Pro gives me some warnings for "Duplicate Content" on the empty ones (I think it does so because the pages are so empty that they are quite similar). I guess Google could also think bad of my site if I have hundreds or thousands of empty pages even if my total amount of pages are 100,000.

So, what to do with these pages for these small cities, towns and villages where there is not always houses for sale? Should I remove them completely? Should I make a 404 when no houses for sale and a 200 OK when there is?

Please note that I have totally 100,000+ pages and this is only about 5% of all my pages.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Marcus, Your proposed idea is good: 404 in case there are no houses for sales and a 200 if there are.

[marcuslind90]

Maybe I should have explained why I was uncertain about it.

Isn't it weird to have a site be 404 and 200 every other week or month and keep changing like that? To me a 404 is a page that is "definitely not here" or "permanently removed". Basically telling Google and visitors "There is nothing here now and there won't be anything here later".

If I set it to a 404 every time the page is empty, and lets say it is empty 6 months out of 12 months of the year. Won't Google remove my page from their index completely?

To me it is the first solution that comes up in my head, thats why I mention it. But at the same time it does not really seem like a way to tell Google that the page is "temporary empty, but might have content in the future".

[marcuslind90]

Anyone have any further suggestion for this? Or any input if it is a good idea to put 404 on a page when its empty, that is probably going to be changed to 200 OK later when it gets content on it?

[davebuts]

Hi Marcus,

You could add canonical tags on the location pages that have no listings and point them to a top level region or another close-by location that does have listings.

The canonical tag will pass on any authority that each location page has and overcome the duplicate content issues that you are seeing.

I imagine that this would be a nightmare job if it had to be done manually, so hopefully you (or your developer) can set a rule that if there are no listings in a location it automatically points a canonical tag to another relevant page.

Another option would be to "noindex" location pages with no listings. This will solve the duplicate issues but won't pass on any authority the location pages might have.

Cheers

[marcuslind90]

And the reason you would chose this over 404 is to be able to pass pagerank? That's the only benefit? This would still make Google remove the page from the index right?

[davebuts]

Correct. It would pass pagerank but Google would also remove the pages from index.

Can you populate the locations with no current listings with random listings from surrounding locations? Or leave older listings live on the page under a heading "Recently Sold" - or something similar?

If you want to overcome duplicate issues and keep the pages indexed, you will need to populate the pages with some sort of unique content you or are going to keep getting these issues.

[marcuslind90]

I think that populating the pages with "old listings" is a great example of what I could do. I could say "No current listings, but these are the last 10 listings that was sold in this area".

Thanks for your input.