New Joomla Website - Confused About 301's

Question

My original Joomla website created numerous URLs that related to the same dynamically generated product page. I have changed website platform (not domain) but the products are the same but now have have different urls. I dealt with the duplicates before using canonicals.

Now that I have changed the platform google is trying to crawl the old urls and obviously getting 404's.

Is it better to ignore this, and wait for google to stop, or redirect the old duplicate pages to a single new one?

eg. Old - www.yyy.com/product-details/product-101 Old - www.yyy.com/product-cat/www/product-101

301 redirect both to the new url of the product:

new - www.yyy.com/101-product

Answer 1

Do the redirects. This is because people will almost always use a search engine when they are looking for a website that has what they want, and if they come across your website in search results, the last thing they want to do is click on a result only to find an error page. They would much rather load a redirection page that automatically takes them to the content they are looking for.

Another problem with making old indexed pages with the HTTP 404 error code is that they tend to stay around in the search engine index longer than pages with the HTTP 410 error code.

The reason is because HTTP 404 error code means the document was not found at this time, but HTTP 410 error code means the document can never be found and will signal to search engines to remove it from their index.