Best practices of 404 product page redirection in magento

Question

We have so many product which are no longer there in our website, but they are already crawled in google. I need to know what are the best practices to redirect them to any other page or something, which will prevent our visitors from 404 error page. Any suggestions on this.

Thanks

Answer 1

after doing some research, yesterday I have finally solve this issue by creating a module with the help of this link

http://evgv.github.io/magento/redirect/categories/product/observer/2016/04/27/redirect-from-disabled-product-to-last-product-category.html

It works perfectly fine

Answer 2

As of my knowledge, I have been facing similar issues. You can alternately use below steps.

1. First step is, convert or redirect the 404 pages into catalog search results, So that your visitors get a page with products similar to the specific product they were looking for(You may implement or use few of the extension from marketplace for this functionality)

2. Update your latest sitemap and submit it to google by regular intervals, this may gradually prevent the 404/not found pages redirection.

3. Instead of 404, redirect to CMS page with proper information and details. for example "Few of the products are no lonager available."

You can find few of the SEO tricks from reducing 404 pages by googling.

Hope this helps.