404 pages on a real estate agency site

[Tomislav]

Hi everyone,

I'd really appreciate your thoughts on the following - a new real estate client has over 8k 404 pages showing in GSC. Previous SEO told them it's fine because 404s are expected for sites in real estate because properties get delisted for various reasons all the time. I've never dealt with the real estate industry but my first instinct is to fix those 404s. Am I wrong?

Some context, the site went through major redesign and restructuring recently. They also went from translating the site from six different languages to two. So, there are thousands of 404s caused by pages from those 4 dropped languages, combined with the regular listings churn.

I recently signed them as a client and I'm trying to figure out whether I should tackle those 404s or just leave them.

 

[Mantas]

Hi,


Looks like you need to get some sort of a process in place. Either keep the listings and not delete them or 301 redirect once the listings are gone to a logical place. If it's categorized by location, I'd redirect everything to that locations listings, etc.

Especially for real estate, I'd assume most of those dropped listing pages have been manually entered, scraped or syndicated to many real estate portal, hopefully with some kind of backlink pointing the listing. Why not use that juice?

 

[Tomislav]

That's what I was thinking too. I don't want to just leave them as 404s unless it literally doesn't matter. There's just too many of them for comfort.

Good point about 301 redirecting for potential link juice if nothing else. Haven't even thought of that tbh.

Appreciate it!

 

[testitall]

I agree with Mantas. A lot of 404's is a problem. Potentially it's a site quality issue. At a minimum, it's hard on the crawl budget as Google will return to these pages over and over and over. I'd 301 all of these to an internal page that distributes any juice to a lot of pages - an html sitemap, or some primary category page.