Expired Pages Play Hell With Traffic

Are old expired pages such as classified page listings giving you hell with 404?

This is actually a pretty common issue, especially for ecommerce sites that run into “out of stock” issues with their products or product removal from the cart system.

There ends up being two main listings that people have to deal with.  Those that have been indexed by the search engines with link juice that can be salvaged and then those that did not.  The majority of pages like classified listings don’t really get indexed because they don’t have a significant number of incoming links.  It’s possible that some will gain a little presence if the URL is shared by the poster or others.  When the classified listing expires, those links will return a 404 within the search engines.

In instances where there’s not a lot of traffic coming in from a classified listing then a good solution is probably a block on that web address using the robots.txt file.  This can prevent the indexing of those classified pages (provided you control the classified)

Now, on the other hand if you’re talking about a large amount of traffic or links hitting an expired web address then you need to try to salvage that.  Use a 301 redirect to move that traffic to a relevant page – any page that will keep them engaged so that they can’t just bounce away with the back button.

The other option you’ll have to sidestep this problem is to use an XML sitemap that is updated on a regular basis (often daily).  An updated sitemap will remove the URL listings of pages that have expires.  As the search engines continue to index and update, they’ll take note of the change and remove the listing from their index.  This may take longer in some instances, sometimes it goes quickly.  The amount of time it takes can’t be controlled, you simply have to be patient.

Anything you can do to redirect from a flat 404 could save you a lot of lost traffic – and that includes customizing your 404 pages.  When it comes to competing on the web, a flat 404 page with no way out can send a lot of traffic screaming toward your competitors.

This same redirect can help you within a shopping cart/ecommerce system on your site.  If a product is missing, a redirect to a similar product or the parent category can prevent someone from simply dumping out of your site from an error page.

To Your Success,
Joerg Weishaupt

P.s. Get more information on social media and marketing in my free primer "Building A Successful Marketing Strategy". Sign up for your free copy today.

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2. Use Heatmaps to Optimize your Landing Pages
3. Top Search Engine Optimization Techniques For Driving Traffic
4. 10 Local Search Engine Optimization Tips
5. 6 Tried & True Ways To Increase Site Traffic

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