One SEO professional was concerned about backlinks to their sub-category pages causing 404 errors or soft 404s. On these types of pages, content comes and goes.
What happens is there’s usually a bunch of 404s from these backlinks due to this issue.
Their question was: are they seeing a lot of 404s from said backlinks because they are linking to sub-categories that no longer exist?
Also, they asked if it was okay to redirect these links to the parent category.
And, if so, is it okay to use a temporary redirect?
John explained that if Google sees it happening on a larger scale where you’re redirecting to the parent level, then they would see it as a soft 404. And they would see that soft 404 as a 404.
If it ends up being a canonicalization question, then it would come down to the specific URL they would actually show in the search results.
It comes down to the question: why would Google crawl the page anymore if there is little added value because of no content being there?
John also said, in these cases, in addition to canonicals, make sure that the sitemap along with internal linking are all very clear.
This discussion happens at approximately the 13:11 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 5 13:11
So how about this question for you, what we are seeing is that people are linking to us through backlinks to our let’s say, sub-category pages. And the problem is that after some time you know our content comes and goes, which means that sometimes there is more content appearing in some categories, sometimes the content gets deleted. And so, sub-categories can, can be created and can disappear as well.
And we are seeing a bunch of 404s from backlinks because they are linking to two sub-categories that no longer exist. My question here is, is it okay to redirect these links to the parent category? And if we do so, how do we do that with a 302, for example, like a temporary redirect, because in the future, this sub-category might be populated with content again, or it’s kind of, it’s not a permanent redirect.
John 14:42
If we see this happening at a larger scale that you redirect kind of to the parent level, we would probably see that as a soft 404. And we would say, well, the old page is gone. And instead of a 404 code, you’re redirecting, and maybe that’s better for users.
But we see it as a 404. So from a practical point of view, I suspect there’s little SEO difference if you redirect or not. If it makes sense from a user point of view to redirect, then I would just go for it. It’s not that you have a penalty either way. So that’s kind of kind of the first thing with regards to 301, or 302. I don’t think it matters there.
Because we would either see this as a soft 404, or we would see it as a canonicalization question. If it’s a soft 404, then the code doesn’t matter. If it’s a canonicalization question, then it comes down to which URL we show in the search results. And usually, the higher-level one will have stronger signals anyway. And we will focus on the higher level. So that doesn’t matter if that’s a 301 or a 302.
SEO Professional 5 16:04
My follow-up question to this is basically if we do, because we do think it’s better for the user to see the category page instead of a blank page, say, because the parent category is usually very strongly related to the category.
So but my main concern here is if we do this kind of redirection, I don’t know if it could impact future crawling of the sub-category when the when the sub-category appears again, let’s say okay, because as I said, content can come in again, in the sub-category, but if we did a redirect to the parent in the past, or maybe, I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t crawl anymore, that sub-category.
That’s my follow-up concern.
John 17:00
Yeah, I, I suspect there’s a minimal difference, but I don’t know which one would be better. So that’s, that’s kind of the first thing because if we see it as a soft 404, it would be like a 404. And we would slow down crawling of that particular URL, because like, there’s nothing here, why do we have to crawl it every day? If we see it as a redirect, then we would also say, well, we don’t need to crawl this every day.
Because we focus on the primary URL. So I think in both of those cases, it we would slow down crawling of that URL until we get new signals that tell us actually, this is maybe something new again.
And the new signals, I think that would be the stronger side, that would be like internal linking or sitemap file, things like that.
And that would be the stronger sign for us to crawl again. But I think the slowing down of crawling would be similar. In in all of these cases, it might be like, maybe there’s a minimal difference between some of them, but I don’t know which one would be faster, for example.
SEO Professional 5 18:09
Okay. Okay. But okay, but if we include them again, in the same marks, that should be enough to let go or know, hey, maybe take a look at?
John 18:18
Yeah, I think Sitemaps alone is probably not enough, I would really make sure that the internal linking is also clear.
SEO Professional 5 18:27
Perfect. Thank you very much.
