Can You 301 To A 404 Page Or Is This A Redirect Chain

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

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Can You 301 To A 404 Page Or Is This A Redirect Chain

c41lum

9:00 am on Jun 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

As we all know 301 redirect are a pretty hot topic right now, what with everyone rushing to release the grip of the evil panda.

I operate a large site that on some old urls Im struggling to straight 404 because of a new URL structure. What Im having to do is 301 them to a new URL that then returns a 404. At the moment I have this file blocked in robots.txt but really I would like to release these urls and let G know that we have now removed them. (we have 10,000 of this type of URLs showing up in WMT)

Do you think the 301 >>>to>>> 404 would be classed a as redirect chain and cause me more problems.

As always thanks for any advice.

goodroi

3:11 pm on Jun 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

IMHO its not a redirect chain but it is not good. To be honest I have never intentionally had a 301 go to 404.

Why not serve the 404 and forget about the 301?

Are you sure you want 404 instead of 410?

10k 301 redirects? I am hoping these are standardized urls which can be handled with a few lines in htacess otherwise you may have some potential problems.

tedster

3:11 pm on Jun 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

The problem with redirect chain is that the final URL can have a problem ranking. Since you are ending with a 404 status, that's not an issue.

As you know, returning a direct 404 status is the ideal. However, I have seen many websites use 301 to 404 (especially various IIS set-ups) with no apparent harm at all. Just make sure the 404 status is returned, not just a 404 message page.

g1smd

6:23 pm on Jun 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

If this an Apache server, you can have a section right at the beginning of the .htcaccess file that sends "410 Gone" for specific URL requests.

The status will be served immediately and without reference to what content actually exists or not.

lucy24

7:03 pm on Jun 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

What Im having to do is 301 them to a new URL that then returns a 404. At the moment I have this file blocked in robots.txt

Urk. What, exactly, is roboted-out? The 404 page, or the directory that would contain the new URL if it existed? That is, are humans and robots getting the same response? If search engines can't get into the directory, they don't know that there's a 404 at the end of the rainbow.

Voice of experience: If you change over to 410, which seems more reasonable in the long run, don't forget to add a custom 410 page. It can be the same physical page that you use for 404; your average human won't care. But server-default 410 pages are even scarier than server-default 404 pages.

c41lum

3:18 pm on Jun 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

I think I am going to have to look into getting them to 410 on the old url without the 301 redirect.

indyank

5:04 pm on Jun 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

As we all know 301 redirect are a pretty hot topic right now, what with everyone rushing to release the grip of the evil panda.

This made me to do a search on google to find out how 301 redirect is linked to panda using "301 redirects and panda" and I could immediately see an example of a site just pulling feeds from another one ranking ranking ahead of the original..

On one hand google is saying not to have duplicate content and on the other hand it is rewarding feed aggregators (scrapers) by ignoring even the link backs to the original sources in some cases.