Redirects (301/302) versus errors (404)
-
I am not able to convincingly decide between using redirects versus using 404 errors. People are giving varied opinions. Here are my cases
1. Coding errors - we put out a bad link
a. Some people are saying redirect to home page; the user at least has something to do PLUS more importantly it does NOT hurt your SEO ranking.
b. Counter - the page ain't there. Return 404
2. Product removed - link1 to product 1 was out there. We removed product1; so link1 is also gone. It is either lying in people's bookmarks, OR because of coding errors we left it hanging out at some places on our site.
-
To add to what George says....
Google often tries to crawl pages that don't exist - simply to make sure they aren't missing anything on your site. When a page is clearly broken, you want to communicate this to Google by serving a 404 (but you can make it a friendly 404)
Here's what Googler John Mueller has to say:
What about the funky URLs that are “clearly broken?” When our algorithms like your site, they may try to find more great content on it, for example by trying to discover new URLs in JavaScript. If we try those “URLs” and find a 404, that’s great and expected. We just don’t want to miss anything important (insert overly-attached Googlebot meme here)."
Google expects to find 404s on your site. When they don't find 404s for links that should be broken, this sends confusing signals and could cause crawl problems.
I recommend reading this entire article - it's one of the most helpful I've ever read on the subject: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ch/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html
As for expired products - as George said it's best to 301 them, usually to a category level page.
-
I have similar issue, Recently Google blocked my blog for Google Adsense then after removing two to five articles, now they are online.
But now i get more 404 error for that page. I removed from the blog, I drafted them, in case if google not allowed the ads, i will re-publish it.
Now i have to remove the post link from the search results and from cPanel i can redirect to the home page
Their Page Authority is 25-30 respectively ! Plz advice me !
-
Richard and Moosa are right, use a friendly 404 page to help your users when they reach a page that can no longer be found. Simply redirecting them to the home page doesn't fix the issue of the missing page. Here's an old, but relevant, post on the subject: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/personalizing-your-404-error-pages.
For your second issue, if you've permanently moved to a new product page, you should certainly 301 redirect to not only pass on all the link juice from the old page, but also to provide the best user experience for your customers - they were looking for the product so give them the new improved page :).
-
Ok, here is the easiest way to understand this (As far as I think)!
- 404: This is the status code that browser give when the page on the website is not available.
- 302: This is the status code of the page if it is temporary redirected to some new page. This simply means that old page will not pass the link juice to the new page but when user reach to this URL will drive them to a new location.
- 301: This is the status code which does almost the same work as 302 but in that case old URL passes its link juice as well. This is commonly known as permanent redirection.
Websites usually should not use 404 as this disturbs the user experience of the page but upon requirement and keeping scenarios in mind use of 301 or 302 is always an intelligent approach.
-
Hi For 1: I would suggest a custom friendly 404 page. This means the user sees a page saying something like 'Sorry the product / page you were after no longer exists. Here are some useful options ( then list a handful of popular page links). You could even includes a site search or your tel number / email to contact. This means the user knows what has hppened, had somewhere useful to go but it returns a 404. For 2: If the page is being moved - use a 301 redirect on the existing page. If you are simply not selling that product anymore than do a 404 as above. In both cases monitor your GA and GWT for 404s and fix where applicable. All the best. Richard
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do we still have this Page Rank / Link juice / Link equity? So this dilution concept?
Hi all, As per the traditional or standard SEO rules, we have this link juice and dilution concept. Many websites have changed their linking structure with this with the beleif "the more number of pages, the PR will get diluted". Then many websites avoided more number of pages from homepage to avoid link juice dilution. Even we followed same. But I just wonder it's still the same way Google handles websites and rankings as per the links. And many websites even avoid more number of 2nd tier/hierarchy pages to avoid link dilution. I have gone through our competitors where they been employing lot of top level pages like 2nd tier/hierarchy pages but still doing good at rankings. Please share your views and suggestions on this. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Is it still necessary to have a "home" page button/link in the top nav?
Or is it not necessary to have a "home" tab/link because everybody by this time knows you can get to the home page by clicking on the logo?
Web Design | | FindLaw0 -
Tips on finding the right Senior Designer / Design Director
Hello Everyone, I manage a fairly large educational website that we are looking to completely redesign to improve the overall site user experience and usability. In the past I, a non-designer, business person, would just roughly draw how I thought the site should look and our developer (who is good, but not a web designer) would just try his best to make everything look profession. Over the years, it has become painfully obvious that we need to invest in more design expertise and move towards a modern, smartly designed website. So my question: Where are the best places to find good freelance designers? I have of course conducted web searches, browsed elance, and asked my network for referrals. However, I am finding that most of the really good ones, ones who have to ability to take charge and lead us through this entire process, and who have at least a basic understanding of SEO principles, work for larger integrated development shops who also expect their people to develop the new site as well. We already have a developer and are primarily looking for the design expertise. Does anyone in the Moz community have any suggestions or even referrals? Thanks! Eric
Web Design | | Eric_R0 -
SEO strategy for UK / US websites
Hi, We currently have a UK-focused site on www.palmatin.com ; We're now targeting the North American market as well, but the contents of the site need to be different from UK. One option was to create another domain for the NA market but I assume it would be easier to rank with palmatin.com though. What would you suggest to do, if a company is targeting two different countries in the same language? thanks, jaan
Web Design | | JaanMSonberg0 -
How to redirect special pages to new domain?
Hello. I have 2 websites in diffrent category and i want to move some of my visitor that arrived in specific page of doamin1 (url like this: http://example.com/pages/.........)to root of domain 2.
Web Design | | vahidafshari450 -
301 forwarding during site migration problem - several url versions of the same page....
Hello, I'm migrating from an old site to a new site, and 301 forwarding many of the pages... My key problem is this I'm seeing www.website.com/ indexed in SE and www.website.com/default.aspx in showing as URL when I'm on homepage - should I simply 301 forward both of these? Then for several internal pages there are 2/3 versions of each page indexed. Canonicalization issues. Again, I'm wondering whether I should 301 forward each URL even if there are several different indexed URLs for the same page? Your advice will be welcome! Thanks in advance - Luke
Web Design | | McTaggart0 -
Home page redirect - will this cause an SEO problem
Hello, We are using Wordpress to build a wiki site. The wiki plugin we're using (Wordpress Wiki lite) can only be set up on an internal page like nlpwiki(dot)org/wiki Can we redirect the home page to the /wiki subdirectory and use nlpwiki(dot)org/wiki as our home page? I've never done that, just wondering if it will be indexed as the home page or if there are any connonical issues. Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
Homepage and Category pages rank for article/post titles after HTML5 Redesign
My site's URL (web address) is: http://bit.ly/g2fhhC Timeline:
Web Design | | mcluna
At the end of March we released a site redesign in HTML5
As part of the redesign we used multiple H1s (for nested articles on the homepage) and for content sections other than articles on a page. In summary, our pages have many many, I mean lots of H1's compared to other sites notable sites that use HTML5 and only one H1 (some of these are the biggest sites on the web) - yet I don't want to say this is the culprit because the HTML5 document outline (page sections) create the equivalent of H1 - H6 tags. We have also have been having Google cache snapshot issues due to Modernzr which we are working to apply the patch. https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/issues/1086 - Not sure if this would driving our indexing issues as below. Situation:
Since the redesign when we query our article title then Google will list the homepage, category page or tag page that the article resides on. Most of the time it ranks for the homepage for the article query.
If we link directly to the article pages from a relevant internal page it does not help Google index the correct page. If we link to an article from an external site it does not help Google index the correct page. Here are some images of some example query results for our article titles: Homepage ranks for article title aged 5 hours
http://imgur.com/yNVU2 Homepage ranks for article title aged 36 min.
http://imgur.com/5RZgB Homepage at uncategorized page listed instead of article for exact match article query
http://imgur.com/MddcE Article aged over 10 day indexing correctly. Yes it's possible for Google index our article pages but again.
http://imgur.com/mZhmd What we have done so far:
-Removed the H1 tag from the site wide domain link
-Made the article title a link. How it was on the old version so replicating
-Applying the Modernizr patch today to correct blank caching issue. We are hoping you can assess the number H1s we are using on our homepage (i think over 40) and on our article pages (i believe over 25 H1s) and let us know if this may be sending a confusing signal to Google. Or if you see something else we're missing. All HTML5 and Google documentation makes clear that Google can parse multiple H1s & understand header, sub & that multiple H1s are okay etc... but it seems possible that algorythmic weighting may not have caught up with HTML5. Look forward to your thoughts. Thanks0