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Thanks for the reply Kaushal. We actually don't have a system currently that lists similar products and considering we have over 20 million products, it's also not a minor thing to implement. Anyway I'm not sure I like the way other sites try to push products that aren't really what you were looking for.

Hey forum,

My site is a Price Comparison site. Lately I've been getting some "Soft 404" errors with the Webmaster tool. I'll try to explain the steps causing it:

1. There's a valid link to a product

2. At some point the product is temporary out of stock or unavailable.

3. Google crawls this product page, getting a valid page with a message explaining this product is unavailable at this time.

4. Google see this page for few different products and (I assume) figures it's a none existing page and so it's a soft 404.

The possible solutions I see are:

1. Return real 404, I'm not a fan of this solution, because these links will very likely be valid again when the product is back in stock.

2. Live with some "soft 404" errors in the webmaster tool.

3. Find another way to explain to Google that it's not a real 404. This sounds great but I'm not sure how this can be done.

Any thoughts which would be the best method? Or maybe another solution I haven't thought of?

Thank you.

Thanks Owen, I hope you are right.

I'm doing a major URL rewriting on our site to make the URL more SEO friendly as well as more comfortable and intuitive for our users. Our site has a lot of indexed pages, over 250k. So it will take Google a while to reindex everything.

I was thinking that when Google Bot encounters the new URLs, it will probably figure out it's duplicate content with the old URL. At least until it recrawls the old URL and get a 301 directing them to the new URL. This will probably lower the ranking of every page being crawled.

Am I right to assume this is what will happen? Or is it fine as long as the old URLs get 301 redirect?

If it is indeed a problem, what's the best solution? rel="canonical" on every single page maybe? Another approach?

Thank you.

Thank you very much Matt.

Now I get it

Thank you Matt,

From the article: "The takeaway here is that whenever possible, it is better to internally link to the version with the backslash."

Just to be clear, does this mean that all my internal links should not contain a trailing slash and I should make sure links with a trailing slash are internally redirected to the same page?

If I remember correctly, when I did this SEOmoz marked it as duplicate content, but Google seemed to be fine with it.

I know I'm being very picky here, I just want to make sure I don't loose ranking because of something that seems so minor.

Thanks.

I keep reading contradicting information, so I figured I'll ask here.

What's the best practice for slash '/' at the end of a URL?

Should it be idealchooser.com/search/laptop/ or idealchooser.com/search/laptop (no trailing slash)?

The options:

1. Accept both equally

2. Accept 1 and redirect the other with 301

3. Accept 1 and treat the other as a wrong URL returning 404

Which would be the best for SEO?

Thank you.

Thank you for the reply Megan, just what I was looking for.

Is there a way to slow down SEOmoz crawl rate? My site is pretty huge and I'm getting 10k pages crawled every week, which is great. However I sometimes get multiple page requests in one second which slows down my site a bit.

If this feature exists I couldn't find it, if it doesn't, it's a great idea to have, in a similar way to how Googlebot do it.

Thanks.

And now I'm back to the top SERP results for my main keywords. For example "price drop alerts" now returns my site as the 4th results after being gone from the first 5 pages for about 10 days. No major changes to the site or links to it that can explain it. I can literally pinpoint the exact hour it happen, yesterday between 6 and 7pm NY. Suddenly my Google organic traffic multiplied by 50 or even 60.

I'm obviously very happy to get decent traffic again, but knowing the past patterns, this will only last for few days followed by few more days of being gone again over and over.

If anyone has a clue what can cause this, I'd be very happy to know about it.

Thanks Kristina. I believe there's something else I'm missing here, not just regular back links, because of the length of time it's been going on for and the huge fluctuations I'm seeing.

On the other hand, since I can't figure out what's going on, I guess it could be anything

Sure, "price drop alerts" without the quotes, about 10 days ago I was the 5th results, now I'm practically not there at all. If the past is any indication I'll be back up at some point.

Thanks for the reply Kristina.

Yes, very much so, when I'm low I barely see any traffic from Google and when I'm high I see reasonable numbers, at least numbers I'm fine with considering the site is relatively new.

Yeah, very much a rollercoaster behavior, just an example: 12 days high, 10 days low, 11 days high, 10 low, 5 high, 8 low, 3 high, 7 low and it just keeps going randomly.

I made few changes to titles and URL structure, but nothing major and I've seen this up and down behavior even between changes. Every change to a page URL was replaced with 301 to the new URL, no 404 from Google crawl.

Thanks for the reply Travis, but that's not it. I'm using a proxy server to test my real position, so I'm not getting personalized results. Also SEOmoz PRO who I configured to track this keyword for me was saying I'm the 5th result and later that I'm not at the top 50.

I'm working on iDeal Chooser, a Comparison Shopping site and we've been having a weird problem with some of our major keywords on Google for the past couple of months. We keep moving between the first page of the results to disappearing completely. For example a Google search for "price drop alerts" returns idealchooser.com as result 3-5 for a while and suddenly doesn't return us at all, then we are back to the top results only to disappear again later.

We can't figure out what causes it, we didn't see any pattern and it seems completely random. We can be the 4th result for 2 weeks and suddenly we are gone for another 2 weeks. SEOmoz PRO had some good SEO suggestions which we implemented, however nothing that could explain this and even after fixing these issues this weird behavior continues.

Any idea will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.