Url Redirect SEO question

[luxer]

I have been cleaning up a lot of 404's on my website. Products that have been removed/sold out etc. My questions is this,

What happens from an SEO perspective if I redirect a page to a search for the general product

Missing/old no longer relevant url

https://www.website.com/product/bluewidget

redirect to ------>

https://www.website.com/pages/search-results?q=bluewidget

The result will be a search query that will bring up multiple new relevant products. I am curious if anyone knows how Google view this.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Make sure you set your search pages to be 'noindex.' Google will bust your head over Panda issues if you have them indexing auto-generated pages like that. Otherwise, if you keep it all 'dofollow' the juice should still flow. I don't think they'll mind crawling through those search pages, but they definitely don't want them in the index.

Is there no category page to aim them at though? At least that way you're conserving the juice a little better.

 

[turbin3]

Generally, I'd try to send link value to something other than a SERP page. There are a few niches where ranking SERP pages is the standard behavior. Those are the exception, and the competition are big brands, so that doesn't really apply to 99% of us.

Normally, you want to block SERP pages from being crawled, noindex them, and focus crawls, link value, and rankings on indexable pages like a product or category page.

 

[voLdie]

Yea I would send it to the homepage or something relevant. No sense on wasting it on pages that won't get indexed.

 

[luxer]

Make sure you set your search pages to be 'noindex.' Google will bust your head over Panda issues if you have them indexing auto-generated pages like that. Otherwise, if you keep it all 'dofollow' the juice should still flow. I don't think they'll mind crawling through those search pages, but they definitely don't want them in the index.

Is there no category page to aim them at though? At least that way you're conserving the juice a little better.

Great feedback everyone. I will send them to a collection page that has a collection of the type of product that is no longer available (ones that are currently available).

@Ryuzaki How do I set my search pages to 'noindex'? I don't have access to the robots.txt (Shopify)