This post addresses 404s vs. redirects in technical docs, and why you should avoid redirects that don’t target relevant replacement content. I’m talking specifically about the practice of redirecting articles or node pages to landing pages.

Here’s what I’ll cover:

• An engaging personal story about bad tech doc redirects
• What’s the effect of a 301 redirect?
• Marketing content vs. tech doc strategy
• What’s a “soft 404” and why avoid it?
• Tidy up to avoid unnecessary 404s
• A useful 404 page can reduce customer frustration

This really needs a diagram, so here you go:

Engaging personal story about bad tech doc redirects

I’m the tech support person for my family: I set up the parental controls for the Xbox, keep the broadband router happy, and so on.

Microsoft.com apparently has a policy that doesn’t allow any support content to 404 when it’s removed. I’ve been rerouted to support landing pages or marketing pages, when I expected to get a specific answer from a link I clicked, such as “Why parental control settings are an illusion.”

As a customer, I’m not knowledgeable about the content architecture and I assume links are intentional, so I hopefully scan each page I’m sent to. Although you may think a redirect from a retired support article to a landing page is helpful, for the customer it’s just confusing.

What’s the effect of a 301 redirect?

A 301 redirect signals search engines that a page has been permanently replaced by another page, when the retired URL sends a site visitor to different URL. The search equity (essentially, the search rank the page has acquired over time) from the retired page is transferred to the target page of the the redirect. This is why redirects are appealing to web authors.

Marketing content vs. tech doc strategy

Marketing content has engagement— keeping people reading or doing things on your site—as a high priority. Engagement isn’t as high a priority for most technical documentation, where customers visit briefly to find answers to specific questions. (Data I’ve seen seems to support this.)

If you talk to a content strategist for marketing, they’re likely to tell you always to use a 301 redirect (permanent redirect) from content you retire. This often means redirecting to a landing page.

For tech docs, however, 404s are sometimes the best choice. A 404 when there isn’t a good alternative to the page you’re unpublishing will keep your customers from clicking in circles and ultimately reduce frustration.

What’s a “soft 404” and why avoid it?

There may be some variations in the definition of a soft 404, but it’s essentially a redirect to a landing page or other high-level page from an article or node page. Don’t do this. It’s a bad customer experience and more confusing than helpful.

Further, Google Search Console support explicitly recommends against it. No right-minded web publisher wants to anger The Google.

Here’s Google’s guidance:

If your page is no longer available, and has no clear replacement, it should return a 404 (not found) or 410 (Gone) response code. Either code clearly tells both browsers and search engines that the page doesn’t exist. You can also display a custom 404 page to the user, if appropriate: for example, a page containing list of your most popular pages, or a link to your home page.

Tidy up to avoid unnecessary 404s

It’s true: 404s for your site because of bad content hygiene can hurt a site’s customer experience and even its search rank.

By “bad content hygiene,” I mean links to your tech docs from other docs or pages your company owns that return a 404. When you move or delete content, it’s important to remove or change the links to that content. If you can, it’s good to work with top link referrers outside your company to update or remove deprecated links to your content as well.

A useful 404 page can reduce customer frustration

There are many ways to make 404 pages helpful with tech that is readily available. Your 404 page could incorporate a recommendation engine (“people who looked for that page also looked for this page”) or trigger site search results based on keywords in the deprecated URL and filename. Pester your site devs, if your 404 page doesn’t try to provide a good answer.

Conclusion: Redirects must be helpful to customers

Good tech docs answer customer questions quickly. So, don’t confuse goals for site engagement with what the customer wants to accomplish. And don’t send customers in circles. Use 404s, if they are intentional and the right thing to do:

• Don’t redirect retired docs to landing pages or other pages that aren’t relevant to the customer intent of the retired page.
• Fix or remove links on your company site that link to unpublished docs.
• If you can, reach out to partners, bloggers, and so on, to fix inbound links to retired docs.

Also, if your doc site doesn’t already have a helpful 404 page, make a case to your site devs for building one.

Categories: Content strategy, Fun with tech docs