Thank you for your patience. We realized that showing a 404 for removed and sold names was not good web practice, as it was creating thousands of errors. Similar to how ecommerce sites such as eBay and Amazon don’t show a 404 page for a removed product, we have decided to keep a landing page for all removed names in order to avoid broken links, confused customers, and breaks in communication with our partner programs.
After discussing this with our team, we have changed how these pages display—there is no longer a reference to the name being for sale in the page title, description or content. The logo is removed, and so is the inquiry form and sales “footer” with contact information. The intent is to give any visitor (although there are not very many right now) a clear indication that we are no longer the authority for the name and cannot sell it to them.
Please understand that we are not linking to these pages from anywhere on our site, and purely exist in search engines’ indexes. The page will also has a noindex meta tag, so when the crawlers check on these old links (which can take up to 6 months) they will eventually fall off. Keep in mind that the only visitors would be ones who typed in the specific term to a search engine, and our link that now says nothing about the name being for sale will be side-by-side with other links that claim it is for sale. The natural choice for the user will be the other links, which means our link authority will decrease over time.
We do thank you for your feedback and should we decide to make any further changes, we will make sure to let you know.
