Hello, I have around 300 post wordpress affliate blog in 10 categories. Each post is an affiliate product review. Lets say every 7 days 50 affiliate product disappears. So I delete these 50 posts (since there is no product) .... so internal links (link from the site) to these posts doesn't appears anymore since it is wordpress blog. These post are still in google index. So visitors can see link in search engine and go to these pages as well as bots (even these pages have small number of external link pointing to them). So for seo what would be better? 1) Just to make custom 404 error page that is useful for visitors 2) To 301 redirect to category page 3) To 301 redirect to home page I fear that too many 404 errors will hurt my site rankings, will they? But i also think that 301 redirect to for example category page will be usefull for visitors as well for google since in case of 301 redirect google bot will deindex the deleted post and in meantime it will sent them to right category? What do you think about this?
301 redirect to category page seems the best option to me. Even though the post is missing, they will have others to choose from.
If those pages do not have any external inbound links or remaining internal inbound links then having them 404 is the most appropriate action. The 404s are not going to hurt the rankings of any of your remaining URLs on your site. 301 redirecting a web page with no external links does nothing for you from an SEO perspective. If internal pages are still linking to the non-existent pages then find them (using Xenu Sleuth or some equivalent crawler) and fix the links. The search engines will drop the URLs returning 404 statuses after they crawl it a few times and continue to get 404s. You'll just have to ignore the errors in Google Webmaster Tools for a few weeks. Regardless, having a custom 404 page is definitely a must. But if those pages are accumulating external inbound links then you should definitely 301 redirect the each old URL to a remaining page on your site whose content most closely represents the content from the page being redirected. If there is not an equivalent page, the category pages would likey be the most appropriate.
Thanks for taking your time to give me the answer. Actually i do not have any internal links pointing to deleted posts (because it is wordpress blog i use YARPP and wp super cashe but i will clean cashe everytime I delete some pages) but however - i may have a small amount of external links leading to these pages. Will it hurt in some other way if i do not do 301 redirect (except less link juice). Also when i do 301 redirect will it remove deleted page from the google index after some time or immediatelly?
If there is a chance there are external links pointing to the pages then I would 301 redirect them to their corresponding category pages as SeanM5 suggested. The 301 redirects WILL remove the pages from Google's index pretty much as soon as they are 1st detected. However, other engines like Yahoo! frequently leave the old URLs showing in their SERPs... but it's not a problem as long as the 301 redirects remain in place. The user will be redirected to your category page once they click on the link to the old page, so I wouldn't worry about it as long as the 301s are in place.
too many 404 WILL hurt index because your site has problem on no valid links. (this no include the 404 that not link from your site, you can check this at google webmaster tool, if it shown how many pages contain the 404, it's a problem, if not, no big deal) I handle 404 by search, and 301 to a closer URL, others just give a real 404 if search found nothing
Simplest solution- There is option in Google webmaster tool for url/content removal. Just submit those url with remark that those content have been removed and Google will remove those data from it server data base and they will be no longer visible in search result. I have done it for some content removal and worked fine.
Do you mean it will only hurt if i have links to deleted pages from my domain. Since i do not have - maybe only small amount of external links. However when i delete a post from a category it will still be in google index of the category page but it won't be present when google index the category again. But i guess that is fine?
Thanks for taking time to answer however i have like every week 50 post to delete and i do not want to use google webmaster tools.
Sorry but I have to TOTALY disagree. First of all Google does NOT rank sites, they rank URLs. A 404 for a particular URL is ONLY going to affect the ranking of THAT URL. And the 404 HTTP status is part of the HTTP protocol so that it can be used EXACTLY for this reason. The fact that Google shows 404 in WMT has nothing to do with it "hurting rankings". They display them there so that the webmaster can see that they have a broken link on their site or so they can see that other external sites have links on their sites pointing to pages that have been removed so the webmaster can then 301 redirect to a URL instead of wasting the inbound links. Just because something is shown in WMT does NOT mean it's there because it's a problem. If you have no equivalent page on your site when you take down a page, you're SUPPOSED to return a 404 to tell crawlers AND users that the page has been deleted. If you have an equivalent new page then you SHOULD 301 redirect. But the fact remains, 404s are a part of life on the web... Sites like RealEstate.com who have literally millions of pages have 10s of thousands of 404s in their WMT and their are no penalties or negative effects. They are not going to be requesting URL removals or 301 redirecting those pages as real estate listings are sold or dropped. It's absolutely ludicrous to think that the search engines would expect them to. Hell, 90% of website owners don't even know what a 404 or 301 redirect is. The data concerning 404s in WMT is there for informational purposes only so the webmaster can decide for themselves if they need to act or if it is 404ing by design.
Of course too many 404 pages hurts rankings. It sends a message to search engines that you have too many broken links. What I do is make a custom 404 page and 301 redirect it to my archive page using .htaccess
Yes i checked for: 1) http://www.realestate.com/post - it is 404 error so i suppose whenever listing expiries then they remove url from site and give 404 error to the page. 2) Old ebay listing - for example http://cgi.ebay.com/Precious-Moment...emQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item20b06a81f9 is 301 redirected to related category. 4)Bestbuy: http://www.bestbuy.com/Shopping/ProductDetails.aspx?p=EC12118080000&pg=2000000000 404 error. 5) Some sites returns 200 ok ... and just show their search page.
- returning 404 will soon ( help ) deindex the pages - you as an owner of the blog can fix the links yourself so that they don't point to "nowhere" - you as an owner of the blog can as well apply the 404 response so you'll get rid of the indexed junk pages.
I suppose you mean on 404 errors when a page is 404 error and there is live link to that page from my site. When i remove page i remove all links to that pages from the site. Is that ok?
Thanks Regarding bolded part. I do not have any broken links appears on the site. It is a wordpress blog so as soon as page is removed it disappears from the site.
This can certainly hurt your rating. You need to correct these errors fast before it starts hurting you.
The too many of 404 pages would absolute caused your ranking dropped without a doubt. It is a sign of low quality website from Google perspective to be honest. 301 could help a little since you have only two choices between redirect to your category page and homepage. The 301 could help if you redirect to the replacement one and not just category or homepage. However, if I have to choose then I would go with category of each post instead of homepage. 50 of 301 redirect to homepage is sound unreasonable to be after all.
Even without any internal links pointing to these pages? Also why would it be sign of low quality for example si like craigslist.org, other classified ads sites such as kiji gumtree .... then big shopping sites such as http://www.amazon.com or http://bestbuy.com have thousands of ads/product listing pages removed every day (because eventually products do gets out of production so amazon is basically totally changed every 2 years) examples: http://toronto.en.craigslist.ca/tor/atq/1874066093213131.html