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I had on my website category pages.

they were http://my.site.com/en/somecountry/category/ but with the structure change of my site (it's rather new), I have no need for this http://my.site.com/en/somecountry/category/ anymore.

Now, google sees it as a crawl error. Obviously... How should I deal with it. I know I have to do a redirect 301 but the big question is... To where!

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I think only you can answer that. Where is the place where people can find the things that most closely match what was at that URL? – paulmorriss Apr 7 '11 at 12:26
Based on some of the Answers, I'm confused - did you change the URL, or eliminate it? – Cyclops May 8 '11 at 22:43
They are eliminated. – ndefontenay May 9 '11 at 4:56

2 Answers

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The most user-friendly way would be to tell the visitor that you don't have category X any more, and to give a few alternatives - put some links/teasers to other sections/category that are similar, or link your best offer, latest news, whatever. It is basically "sorry we don't have that anymore, but this is shiny too" - turn the visit on an error page into an opportunity to sell/show something else.

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If all you did is removed the language specifier (the /en/ in the URL) why not just do a 301 redirect from /en/somecountry/category/ to /somecountry/category/? This way users can find their way to the same content and search engines will also know the content has moved and to index the new pages and associate any links to the old pages to the new ones.

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Hi. No, category pages was the result of not enough thought in the creation of URLs (it's my first web project) and I got rid of it completely. So I'm not certain as to where to redirect except a soft 404. – ndefontenay May 9 '11 at 2:54

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