Dealing with Dead Pages on an Ecommerce Site
-
Hello everyone!
I'm working on a project for a small jewelry store. They have a store in North Carolina and an ecommerce site (on Shopify - which I loathe!). I'm not exactly an SEO expert, but the client likes the way I handle social media and I know enough to get them much farther down the road than they are now.
The big problem is that most everything sold is handmade and one of a kind. So, the site has LOTS of dead links. I'd love everyone's suggestions on how to:
- Best avoid this in the first place as new products are added and promoted via Facebook, Twitter, blog posts and so on
- Suggestions for managing the sold items - I don't think it seems wise to leave them up as "SOLD"
The site is http://www.laurajamesjewelry.com
I'm grateful for your assistance! And look forward to sharpening my SEO skills.
~Robin
-
We don't have the unique products that you do but here is the policy we follow:
- For Non-book items that we quit carrying we either 301 redirect to a similar item or to the main category for the product along with a message on the screen that the item isn't available but here is another idea.
- For book items that go out of print we leave the item up but have a pop-up telling the customer the item is out of print and we either link to another edition, format or related category.
- For annual items we have just decided to keep reusing the same sku and changing the details. Why waste all the link juice that may be gained each year by discontinuing an item that hardly changes from year to year but expires each year? For all of our past yearly items we are now 301 redirecting them to our permanent sku.
-
Thanks everyone for the responses. Perhaps leaving them up is the best way to manage it. I have to talk with my client and better understand how she works. I hate having all these pages removed, especially as I pump up the social sharing and, hopefully, add ratings and reviews. Then we'd be deleting plenty of search juice.
-
Hi Robin.
If an item is created, images of the jewelry are taken and the product is listed for sale? The question is, when the item sells doesn't that product page still have value? I would think you should keep the page so potential buyers can view products which have been made. A customer could request a similar item be made. If that is the case, keep the pages, mark the item as sold and offer links to similar products or a custom order link.
If the desire is to only sell items presently in inventory, you can 301 old links to similar pages. If there is a link to a 1 carat diamond ring, find the most similar item or category on your site and redirect the link to that page.
-
I don't think it seems wise to leave them up as "SOLD"
Don't make them dead links. Instead, create a portfolio of past work. These pieces might attract links, they might inspire sales, they will showcase craftsmanship and style.
Remove the price and any sales yada yada... and then add when the piece was made and a little more information about it.
You might not need a separate page for each one... maybe a gallery of emerald earrings or diamond pendants?... a big long page of beautiful work... Lots of visitor will scroll down that page and decide... "I want one like this but with a ruby"
-
You bring up a really interesting question. When you say dead links I assume they just lead to nowhere. Ideally you would 301 Redirect (which will pass most of its value to another page therefore keeping some of that SEO steam you have built up) to a page that allows the user to continue to search for similar or related products, keeps them on site with out scaring them away with a "File Not Found" error on their page, etc... I am not familiar with Shopify so I am not sure if its possible. Might be helpful if you were to post one of these links so that we can all take a look at it and work it out as a team.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Main Site and eCommerce Site URLs for SEO
My client currently has a main website on a url and an eCommerce site on a subdomain. The eCommerce site is currently not mobile friendly, has images that are too small and are problematic - and I believe it negates some of the SEO work we do for them. I had to turn off Google Shopping ads because the quality score was so low. That being said, they are rebuilding a shopping cart on a new platform that will be mobile friendly BUT the images are going to be tiny until they slowly replace images over several months. Would you keep the shopping cart on a subdomain, or make it part of the main website URL? Can it negatively impact the progress we have made on the main site SEO.
Technical SEO | | jerrico10 -
Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.
I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
Technical SEO | | MarketHubb
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?1 -
3,511 Pages Indexed and 3,331 Pages Blocked by Robots
Morning, So I checked our site's index status on WMT, and I'm being told that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and the robots are blocking 3,331. This seems slightly odd as we're only disallowing 24 pages on the robots.txt file. In light of this, I have the following queries: Do these figures mean that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and blocking 3,331 other pages? Or does it mean that it's blocking 3,331 pages of the 3,511 indexed? As there are only 24 URLs being disallowed on robots.text, why are 3,331 pages being blocked? Will these be variations of the URLs we've submitted? Currently, we don't have a sitemap. I know, I know, it's pretty unforgivable but the old one didn't really work and the developers are working on the new one. Once submitted, will this help? I think I know the answer to this, but is there any way to ascertain which pages are being blocked? Thanks in advance! Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Switchboard Tags - Multiple desktop pages pointing to one mobile page
I have recently started to implement switchboard tags to connect our mobile and desktop pages, and to ensure that our mobile pages show up in rankings for mobile users. Because our desktop site is much deeper in content than our mobile site, there are a number of desktop pages we would like to have point to one mobile page. However, with the switchboard tags, this poses a problem because it requires multiple rel=canonical tags to be placed on the one mobile page. I'm assuming this will either confuse the search engines, or they will choose to ignore the rel=canonical tag altogether. Any ideas on how to approach this situation other than creating an equivalent mobile version of every desktop page or implementing a user agent detection redirect?
Technical SEO | | JBlank0 -
How can I change the page title "two" (artigos/page/2.html) in each category ?
I have some categories and photo galleries that have more than one page (i.e.: http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos and http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos/page/2). I think that I must change the tittle and description, but I don't how. I would like to know how can I change the title of each of them without stay with duplicate title and description. Thank you! ahcAORR.jpg
Technical SEO | | otimizador20130 -
Home page indexed but not ranking...interior pages with thin content outrank home page??
I have a Joomla site with a home page that I can't get to rank for anything beyond the company name @ Google - the site works fine @ Bing and Yahoo. The interior pages will rank all day long but the home page never shows up in the results. I have checked the page code out in every tool that I know about and have had no luck....by all account it should be good to go...any thoughts/comments/help would be greatly appreciated. The site is http://www.selectivedesigns.com Thanks! Greg
Technical SEO | | DougHosmer0 -
Indexed pages and current pages - Big difference?
Our website shows ~22k pages in the sitemap but ~56k are showing indexed on Google through the "site:" command. Firstly, how much attention should we paying to the discrepancy? If we should be worried what's the best way to find the cause of the difference? The domain canonical is set so can't really figure out if we've got a problem or not?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
Why won't the Moz plug in "Analyze Page" tool read data on a Big Commerce site?
We love our new Big Commerce site, just curious as to what the hang up is.
Technical SEO | | spalmer0