Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Rob Morgan,

You've talked about 2 issues here, please find my views on them:

1. "Since launching my new website design - www.advanced-driving.co.uk I am not convinced Google is seeing all the content on the page. I took a long extract of text and did a search on Google and nothing was found. Also although in the search results for "advanced driving course" I can see the new title tag, the snippet isn't showing"

   => Here, you can check the cached version of any given page by googling "cache:<url-you-want-to-check>" and then clicking on "Text Version".</url-you-want-to-check>

2. As a scroll down I can see the URL changes i.e:
   www.advanced-driving.co.uk
   then: http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/#da-page_in_widget-3
   then: http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/#da-page_in_widget-4
   then: http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/#da-page_in_widget-5

   => This is absolutely fine as far as canonical URL is there, and its there in your case. So, good to go

Hope this helps!

Hi Jay,

I would suggest you to buy the .com domain if its available. Using a country specific domain to target international market is not a good idea. If .com isn't available, you can think about buying country specific domains to target various countries.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo can help you understand more on this. Hope this helps!

Hi AngeloS,

I agree with Yossi that soft 404 is not a good practice if the product isn't available.

But here, you're talking about the case where your product isn't available anymore, which is not the 404 case clearly. 404 means, resource not found on the website. So, your page is not 404 semantically as page it still there with a different availability status.

Here comes my recommendations on this:

• If the "product" is temporarily unavailable, you can show an appropriate message with 200 http status. Additionally,  for better UX, you can show a recommendation bar showing other related products and a notify-me option where you can get user's email id on which you can send a notification mail as soon as this product gets back in stock.
• If the "product" is permanently discontinued and you want to get rid of that page altogether, you can probably show 200 http status with an appropriate message and have a noindex tag on these pages, or you can start showing 410 http status if you want to convey a message to bots that your "page" won't come back ever.

You can read more about HTTP status codes here.

Hope this helps!