404s on Expired Listings

This topic contains 9 replies, has 4 voices, and was last updated by  Guust 7 years, 11 months ago.

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  • April 12, 2017 at 9:06 pm #373207

    Ollie Stott
    Expired Member
    Post count: 60

    Hi there

    Is there any way that we can create a status for each listing whereby, when they reach an expiry date, rather than changing to a draft status, they remain published but don’t appear in the listings?

    My concern here is that they will start to generate a lot of 404s after a while and we would want to avoid using a 301 Redirect Plugin.

    April 12, 2017 at 10:14 pm #373217

    Guust
    Moderator
    Post count: 29970

    All links to the expired listing disappear from your site as well, so the only 404s should result from other [“manual”] links to that page, so a search engine should not get a 404 when they crawl your site because it should not find any link to the page anymore.
    Thanks

    April 12, 2017 at 10:35 pm #373223

    Paolo
    Site Admin
    Post count: 31211

    Yes while they are in draft, Google will flag them as 404, but that’s how every website deals with removed items from their indexes…

    Few 404 are a natural thing for every websites and Google will not penalize you unless you have an unnatural number of them.

    Thanks

    April 13, 2017 at 10:06 am #373272

    Ollie Stott
    Expired Member
    Post count: 60

    Ok the problem is that all of our listings have an expiry date set, so eventually they will all result in 404 errors

    We promote every listing that is featured as well across social media and therefore all of those links to the site profiles will result in a 404. What we’d ideally like is for listings to be accessible but not listed. How can we do that?

    April 13, 2017 at 11:49 am #373284

    Guust
    Moderator
    Post count: 29970

    Are they events? Then rather than expiring them, you can leave them live, and set all defaults to only show future events. When the date passes, they will not automatically show anywhere, unless people look for past events.

    If they are not events, maybe change category on expiry, possibly by way of changing price package on expiry, and then they are not available except in that category. That’s the only workaround I can think off.

    Thanks

    April 13, 2017 at 11:51 am #373285

    Stiofan O’Connor
    Site Admin
    Post count: 22956

    I am not really sure what you expect us to do?
    I would suggest you maybe redirect 404’s to a pages stating you might have found an expired listing? There are plugins to do that.

    Stiofan

    April 13, 2017 at 12:33 pm #373298

    Ollie Stott
    Expired Member
    Post count: 60

    Thanks both – yes wanted to avoid the plugins to create the 301 redirects. It was more whether the listings (not events) were able to have a different trigger that defines whether it is included within the category listings rather than those published.

    I’m going to look to change to events as I agree this would be a better way forward.

    Many thanks again

    April 13, 2017 at 12:51 pm #373306

    Guust
    Moderator
    Post count: 29970

    You’re welcome 🙂

    April 16, 2017 at 4:16 pm #373739

    Ollie Stott
    Expired Member
    Post count: 60

    Thanks – feel free to close the ticket. The solution really is to change to the events extension and view by upcoming rather than expire on date.

    April 16, 2017 at 11:41 pm #373767

    Guust
    Moderator
    Post count: 29970

    Thanks for letting us know – ticket set to closed.

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