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A clients website has a lot of joboffers (thousends), which when are filled go offline. I made 404 page specially for these joboffers with recommendations to other offers. My client says he gets the Google Search Console warning: Increase on 404 pages on clients website. He says he wants to redirect the pages to joboffers overview page to solve this. But i guess that is unexpacted behaviour and will result in soft-404's?

In my opinion the custom joboffer 404 provides the visitor the best solution but results in a Search Console warning.

And if i would redirect to the overview should it be 302? Urls can be used again in the future. I thought i would maybe add an extra parameter to the overview url to enable a message to note the visitor of the no longer available offer to clarify the unexpected behaviour.

What is best practice here?

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Best practice is to go with the rich 404 pages, not the redirects.

My client says he gets the Google Search Console warning: Increase on 404 pages on clients website.

That warning is designed to notify you of potentially unexpected 404 URLs. The 404 URLs for your job postings are expected, so the warnings for those URLs should be ignored. According to Google Search Console Help, If it is a deleted page that has no replacement or equivalent, returning a 404 is the right thing to do. The report should stop showing the 404 after about a month.

He says he wants to redirect the pages to joboffers overview page to solve this. But i guess that is unexpacted behaviour and will result in soft-404's?

Redirecting deleted content pages to general pages is always a bad experience for the site's visitors, and search engines are wise to it as a "trick" to try to retain ranking power. It's bad practice.

I thought i would maybe add an extra parameter to the overview url to enable a message to note the visitor of the no longer available offer to clarify the unexpected behaviour.

You don't need to worry about redirect types or URL parameters if you follow best practice, which is to use a rich 404 page with links to other job offer pages.

The situation seems pretty straightforward to me, you've followed best practice and now your client wants you to deviate from it, probably because they are unaware that it's best practice.

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  • That's confirming my thoughts as it helps the visitor but does that mean you can just ignore the "Increase of 404 errors" in Search Console or will it damage your SEO?
    – Gijs
    Apr 13, 2022 at 6:49
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    Yes, you can ignore the 404 errors in Search Console. Also from the help page I linked: In general, 404 errors won’t impact your site’s search performance, and you can safely ignore them if you’re certain that the URLs should not exist on your site ... Many (most?) 404 errors are not worth fixing because 404s don't harm your site's indexing or ranking.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Apr 13, 2022 at 17:09

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