404+google+WP+eBay listings

[fish]

I have several wp sites that take a feed from ebay. These listings on my sites get indexed nicely on goog.

The problem however is they are only valid for the time of the ebay listing and expire after 7 days or so. I can't leave them on my sites as it's against eb t&c to promote expired listings so they are automatically removed.

This brings about lots of dud links and I'm looking for a satisfactory way to deal with this. People naturally will bounce if they get a '404 page not found' message. I'd like to see if I can engage with the visitor somehow and use not lose this traffic.

Does anyone have a similar scenario, if so how do you deal with it? Hints & tips welcome

Cheers

Fish

 

[wb]

Create a nice customised 404 page which will act as a generic landing page for listings that don't exist.

Don't promote the fact that it's a 404 page though (e.g. use a different heading instead of 'error', and have the content as a listings/category page perhaps)?

 

[Edwin]

Couldn't you make custom "not found" pages for each category? Then you can serve up a "This auction has ended, but there are another 57 whatevers for sale." and then list the first 20 still-running auctions from that category...

 

[fresh79]

Build a custom 404 page and use a plugin like this to do the heavy lifting via an include or shortcode or widget area

 

[fish]

ThankQ all for responses so far.

Build a custom 404 page seems to be popular and other suggestions make good sense too.

Who's going to offer their services to help me get this done? my skill set and knowledge of doing this sort of thing is non existent. Beer tokens available

 

[tafuta]

ThankQ all for responses so far.

Build a custom 404 page seems to be popular and other suggestions make good sense too.

Who's going to offer their services to help me get this done? my skill set and knowledge of doing this sort of thing is non existent. Beer tokens available

I do the exact same thing - however instead of custom 404s - one of my web guys built a URL re writer - so old listings links to ebay automatically shift to the ebay search result for the category...

Tehy are a bit expensive - £75 an hour - but of you want can put you in touch.