: How should an expired content be handled? Let's imagine this simplified case: An auction website has "auction detail" pages. A few weeks after the auction is over, the "auction detail" page is

@Megan663

Google considers redirecting content that is no longer available to be "soft 404". They would like to be able to treat the page the same as a 404 page.

If you redirect the expired page to your home page, Google will identify it as a soft 404. It will appear in Google Webmaster Tools as an error. Google won't pass the link juice from inbound links to the rest of your site.

Right now, Google doesn't appear to be able to identify soft 404s that redirect to a category page. Many sites use this loophole to redirect their expired content. This may change in the future. Google could write better soft 404 detection algorithms.

Google does ask that you use 410 errors for removed content. They treat 410 errors specially, removing the page from the search results right away.

Regardless of which strategy you use for search engines, users like to get a page:


With a message that what they are looking for is no longer available
A list of other options that may meet their needs

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@Sue5673885

The ideal scenario is to keep the content so that it's still indexed, even if not useful. I'll explain:

I worked on a video website that while worked with user submitted videos, sometimes we received requests to remove them. This lead to a lot of 404's being returned which wasn't good for SEO. We approached a redirect to the homepage but the number was so big that a few hundreds redirects were either not very effective nor giving us good SERP results.

The solution was to just remove the video, creating a small notice about why it was removed and giving some other related videos to watch.
This way we eliminated our increasing number of 404's provided by the deleted pages, avoided people having broken Favorites links and kept a minimal good experience while browsing the site.

As those videos were marked as inactive, they stopped appearing on the site searches and only people with direct links or Search Engines could access it.

For your case I would do something like this and show a notice saying the Auction Ended and there are other auctions in the remaining Categories while keeping the title and description because that's unique content you have on your website.

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@BetL925

having 431 redirect is better than 410. because if there are links to your page on the web, they will be redirected to new page and give it some SEO juice.
you can also keep the content(or just page) and add a no-index to it. it will be removed from search engines and you will be able to remove it after a while without worrying about search engines or webmaster tool.

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