Yahoo, meets 404 and 301

What should or shouldnt happen when Yahoo finds 404 or 301 pages

[jgomez]

We recently redid our entire site structure. Its been a few months now, and we are still seeing old URLs indexed in yahoo. they are 404 status. we also applied 301 redirects on URLs that we wanted to point to the most similar pages of our new site. In the past (w/the old site) Yahoo would replace our 301 status pages with the new URLs pretty quickly. But now, its seems like its not going to happen.

We have two different URLs (old one and new one) both showing the same content. The old URLs seem to be ranked higher in the SERPs - and the newer ones about a page or two behind...

Hope this isnt confusing - let me know

Anyone have similar situation?

We are thinking about removing the 301 redirects and lettting all the old URLs 404 out (eventhough most of them havent been removed), and let our new URLs jump higher in the SERPs - hopefully

Or should we just keep two different URLs floating around?

[MarkHutch]

It takes a LONG time for Yahoo to adjust to changes like this. It will happen, but it might take some time before you start to notice the changes. Just because they are not showing up yet, doesn't mean that Yahoo isn't aware of your changes.

[dcrombie]

Yahoo! can take years to recognise a 301 but the other major spiders will generally update within a week or two.
If you want the old addresses removed from the index the proper response to use is 410 - Gone and not 404.

[dlefree]

... but they're not "Gone" - they're "Permanently Moved" ..? (Wouldn't the "Gone" response cause issues with IBL's that hadn't been updated, forcing a new IBL campaign for the pages?)

[BillyS]

This is what I do...

Redirect are simply that. You can now find a page somewhere else...

If the user is trying to get to a page that never existed (typo for example) then you give a 404 (not found).

For pages that have been removed altogether, I return a 410 (gone).

If you had a page that existed and return a 404, the SE might think the server cannot find that page right now (and come back later to try and find it). A 410 says - yeah, it used to exist, but we've removed it (so dont try to find it again).