Ask Is it a good decision for a website domain to desist from redirection and display error 404?

[Brajet]

The company I work for merged with one of our direct competitors a year or so ago. We took the customer base and many employees over to our side and all has been business as usual.

Recently, I visited the non existent domain following some link research and the page is a 404 error. I would have thought this domain would have a redirect to our current operating site, but this is not the case.

I am wondering if this is a large over site, as both these businesses are online retailers and there are still many links for the old company floating around in this niche sector. All of those links and anchor text lead to the original domain and 404 page.

Am I missing something here on why this was not done? Are there any reasons why this could be a bad call?

 

[Anthony Joshua]

I think it depends on the context. Showing a 404 error is fine if a page is truly gone and you don't have a replacement, but it can frustrate users if they were expecting content. Redirecting to a relevant page or the homepage often provides a better experience and keeps people on your site. From what I've seen on Quora and Reddit, 404s are okay for SEO if handled properly, but too many can hurt user trust and engagement.

 

[Felix😎]

The company I work for merged with one of our direct competitors a year or so ago. We took the customer base and many employees over to our side and all has been business as usual.

Recently, I visited the non existent domain following some link research and the page is a 404 error. I would have thought this domain would have a redirect to our current operating site, but this is not the case.

I am wondering if this is a large over site, as both these businesses are online retailers and there are still many links for the old company floating around in this niche sector. All of those links and anchor text lead to the original domain and 404 page.

Am I missing something here on why this was not done? Are there any reasons why this could be a bad call?

That does seem like a big oversight, especially since there are still links pointing to the old domain. Redirecting it to your current site could pass authority from those links and improve traffic while avoiding unnecessary 404 errors. Maybe the old domain was overlooked, or someone thought it wasn't worth the effort. Either way, a simple redirect would help with SEO and user experience, so it's worth raising this with the team.

 

[Dean101]

A 404 basically says, Oops, nothing here, which can annoy visitors and make them bounce. Search engines don't love it either because they might ding your site if too many pages are missing. That said, if the page really is gone for good, a fun 404 page with links to other stuff can help keep people around. Still, most of the time, it's better to redirect folks to something useful so they don't leave frustrated