I am currently in the process of redesigning a job advert site and am trying to put a lot more effort into my SEO.My question is how should I deal with the URLs that point to job adverts when the advert expires. The options I have thought of so far are:Return a 404 error and redirect to a 404 page. Will it have an effect on ranking if there are a lot of URLs that return 404s after only being up for a few weeks?Redirect to job listing page - When the user requests a URL for an advert that has expired just redirect to the main job listing page.Show the advert but tell the user to has closed - Show the advert page but with a notification that the advert has closed. The issue I see with this is that the user will visit the page, see its closed and then leave the site again which would not be good for rankings
SEO: best way to deal with short lifetime URLs?
seo;url
If you know before time when this page (job advert) will expire then consider including an unavailable_after META tag (or X-Robots-Tag HTTP response header) to inform search engines (ie. Google) before time:<meta name=googlebot content=unavailable_after: 30-Mar-2014 18:00:00 GMT>Reference: Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibilityFor a period of time after the listing has expired I would go for a hybrid of all 3 of your options...Show the job advert but make it clear that the position is closed. This is informative to users who have bookmarked the page.Provide links to related jobs/pages and perhaps a prominent link to the main job listing page (since you mention that in #2). Providing useful information to the user and keeping their attention.Return a 404 (or perhaps 410) HTTP Status Code (not the default 404 page). This will inform search engines not to index/return the page in search results. 404s are not harmful to ranking - they are a fact of the web.There should be no links to this page on the website itself.After the period of time, remove the expired job advert and serve the default 404 page (which should contain relevant links to current job adverts).