: Can I combine multiple pages for each user into a single user page using redirects? I have a lot user profiles links indexed on Google, e.g.: example.com/username Before I have public for each

@Ogunnowo487

Since these two pages have been deleted (from public view at least) and they have not moved somewhere else - so there is no equivalent page to redirect to - then the appropriate response is a 404 (as you are already doing).

However, this should be a customised 404 with an appropriate link to the parent page (user profile), so users remain engaged on the site. The user now understands that the URL they followed no longer exists, but are guided to the nearest available.

Google sees the 404 and eventually drops the page from the SERPs.


Can I redirect or not?


Redirecting to a "different" page is likely to be seen as a soft-404 by Google - this is likely to be the only "penalty". As with a regular 404, Google is likely to drop the URL from the SERPs. Since the page doesn't exist anyway, you can't really argue with that.

For the user... The user is redirected to a different page to what they were expecting. This could lead to confusion and an increased bounce rate.

There is also another issue with redirecting... how quickly do you want these pages removed from the index? The cached version of the page might still be available. A redirect (soft-404) might take longer than a proper 404 (which is still subject to some delay). A 410 Gone would be even quicker.

In summary... A customised 404 would be preferable. A redirect is unlikely to see an additional "penalty" with search engines, but could potentially result in some confusion.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Odierno851

I did not recommended to use 301 redirection, because it is not made for that. I have not seen any penalty for misuse of 301 redirection, but may be other seen it.

Your site structure look's like twitter, and when you search some twitter profile with site operator then you will see Google not showing any profile with /profile/following/ URL, and it is because they have blocked it in their robots.txt. And that is what I want to recommended for your site as well.

Actually this robots.txt helps to twitter in SEO also it's help to prevent spam. For example, if I follow your profile, then my profile will be listed in your followers list, and if you allowed to crawl it, then your profile Pagerank will pass to your all followers, and some little PageRank I will also get it. And Google recently announce that, do not link social media company profile that pass pagerank, otherwise both will get penalty, so I think somehow Google using twitter profile Pagerank as well in their ranking.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Sherry384

I think you can redirect all links by a 301-Redirect. That's the official way of google.

Vote Up Vote Down