: Is it bad for SEO to return a 404 for a page that is temporarily unavailable instead of a redirect to the home page? Imagine a site that contains 100's of 'homepages' for merchants. (e.g.

@Ogunnowo487

A 302 to the home page is likely to be seen as a soft-404 anyway, so that's unlikely to be of any benefit.

A 404 can be perceived as temporary (a 410 is more permanent) and if the page doesn't exist then a 404 is certainly valid. There's not a lot you can do; if the page doesn't exist then it doesn't exist.

However, if this is really a "temporary" thing and its absence is planned. Then a 503 "Service Unavailable" status might be appropriate. If the period of time is known then this can be stated in a Retry-After header. The search engines are likely to hold on to the resource for as along as possible. But a "few weeks" might be too long?

If the original page is not available for a lengthy period of time then the search engines will likely drop the page from the SERPs regardless of status code.

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