My Website Sitemap is Getting 404/410 Errors When I Submit it to Google

My Google Webmasters Account Shows “Not Found” 404/410 Errors

404 and 410 “not found” and “gone” errors are a normal part of the way websites work, especially so when it comes to real estate website. Remember that your website is updated every hour with listings from your MLS System, and that includes when listings are sold, expired, or taken off the market. When these listings are no longer available, they are removed from your website: sometimes it can take search engines, like Google, a few weeks to “catch up” and remove these listings from their search indexes.

404 and 410 errors that relate to sold or expired listings do NOT negatively impact your search ranking according to Google. These 404 and 410 errors are important to search engines because they tell them what to STOP including in their search results, and make sure Google and Bing don’t waste valuable indexing time on these inactive listings. Redman has configured these expired and sold listings as 404/410 pages on recommendations from Google itself.

Isn’t it better to use 301 redirects?

Not for sold or expired listings, according to our research. 301 redirects are used as “forwarding addresses”. Basically, they tell a search engine “that content that used to be located here is now located over there”. The reason we don’t use 301 redirects in these cases is because the content — the listing details — no longer exist and shouldn’t exist.

Forwarding the expired listing URL creates a poor user experience. For example, if you forward them to your homepage, they might get frustrated: they were trying to find a listing, and instead were redirected to a page they weren’t interested in without any indicate of WHY they were redirected. Current SEO and User Experience best practice says that sending them to a 404 page that lets them know the listing has been sold or has expired and encourages and also them to search for a similar listing or visit your featured listings is much better. Redman is currently actively working to improve our 404 experience for users.

Additionally, by adding thousands of redirects to the server, your website will begin to slow down, and website speed definitely CAN affect your ranking. 301 redirects are extremely helpful tools, but overuse can cause more problems than they solve.

What kinds of 404/410 errors should I be concerned about?

You should definitely check your Not Found errors in your Google Webmasters account regularly to make sure there aren’t any URLs appearing in the Not Found list that SHOULDN’T be 404ing. For example, if you have linked to a page on your website from Facebook or Twitter but accidentally made a spelling error in the URL, the link will 404. In this case, you would definitely want to have a 301 redirect created for this page, as this is a legitimate error that can and should be fixed with a redirect.

If the only “Not Found” errors you are seeing in Google Webmasters are related to sold or expired listings, then these aren’t actually “errors” in the traditional sense. The listings are no longer available, therefore the pages are no longer available, and a 404/410 code to inform the search engine to stop including these pages in their index.

Knowledge Base

My Website Sitemap is Getting 404/410 Errors When I Submit it to Google

My Google Webmasters Account Shows “Not Found” 404/410 Errors

Isn’t it better to use 301 redirects?

What kinds of 404/410 errors should I be concerned about?

Further Reading