Old proudct pages - eComm Site
-
Hello,
Geeks.com currently has approx. 194k pages in Google index. (approx. 30k suppl.)
We have many thousands of old product urls which have gone out of stock, never to "see the light of day" again. 14 years worth!
Should we be 301'ing all old products pages that go out of stock, if we know for certain we will never carry that SKU again?
If we were to do a "mass" 301 of 30k+ urls how would google or other SE's react to that?
Could there be any negative implications to doing so?
What is considered best practice for eComm sites, as I imagine we are not alone with this type of situation.
Thank you in advance.
Michael B.
-
Mike,
I agree with Alan that it is a serious issue that warrants some attention and planning. Worst case scenario, the expired pages return a 404 and you're missing a big opportunity to boost the rest of the site. Best case scenario, you 301 or link to category or cross-promotional pages to pass PR and visitors to the next most relevant page/category.
The 301 would accomplish this, but like Alan said you run the risk of inadvertently creating redirect loops if there's no long-term planning for potentially thousands of pages and/or categories.
-
if we're talking about thousands of pages falling off, yes, to me, that's a high priority. If you go the 301 route, they should go to the highest page in the chain that product would be associated with that's relevant to the topical intent and relative closeness of match..
So if it's a laser mouse, I wouldn't redirect to the top "desktop computers" or even the "laser mouse" category, but I would 301 it to the mouse optical/trackball category page.
The reason for this is two-fold - it's low enough in the food chain to be highly related, but not so highly related that if the current laser mouse sub-cat disappears altogether that you'd end up in a bad loop of redirects.
That does, then, maintains at least some of the original page authority and boost the parent category.
-
Replied above Andrew - thanks again!
-
Alan and Andrew - thank you for the thought out replies.
- How serious of an issue would you consider this in the first place. Meaning if this were a site you were maintaining would this be high on your list of priorities?
2) If we just did a simple 301 to the highest category from which the product lived within, would that accomplish what you are saying above Alan?
This product below will be out of stock within the next cpl days. There is value here as it's garnered a few root domain links ect....
Is it accurate that once product is out of stock and removed from site navigation these pages are no longer crawled and no longer part of the site's architecure, therefore the rest of the site will no longer benefit from the links they have accumulated over time?
Wouldn't we then want to best to preserve the pages authority and 301 it to boost the parent category?
ex: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?InvtId=M261VP-R
Hopefully I am not confusing you too much! lol
I look forward to your response.
Thank You,
MB
-
Oh Hey Andrew - great link to Rand's Whiteboard Friday on that. I hadn't seen that one. Looks like he covered both our concepts.
-
Andrew's got one path to consider. I've got another. My own most recent example is with a real estate site that has 100,000 property pages that all currently result in a 404 not found. Yes, that's 100k dead pages. So I too feel your pain.
What I recommend to clients is to 301 based on category level criteria. So for example, whatever the highest level category a product had been in - that old page should 301 to the current category page, if one exists. The 301 should append the new URL with a unique identifier for this situation - something like #NLC (for no longer carried) - the # sign being the key, because you can then have an anchor at the top of the content area of those pages that if the referrer includes that #NLC in it, visitors would see a box communicating that the product is no longer carried, and inviting them to browse your current inventory in that category.
Doing this would also require having a canonical URL tag on each category page - just to cover the bases. While anything after the #sign should be ignored as far as causing duplicate content conflicts, it's still best practices to have the canonical URL there in the header.
When no current category exists, then I'd send visitors by 301 to a uniform page (either a product search page or otherwise) yet with the same #NLC string and message.
Of course, getting either Andrew's suggestion or mine implemented will be up to the skills of the programmers doing the implementation. That's a lot of coding that has to be done accurately and thoroughly tested.
-
I've had several large (100k+ pages) clients with similar issues, and despite all the usual "each case is different" disclaimer, I've seen a lot of success with keeping the out of stock items' URLs active, but replacing the content with a message "We're sorry, but this item is out of stock. Might we interest you in product X or content Y?" type of cross-promotion. Depending on your e-commerce platform's ability to dynamically generate different merchandising options, it may be difficult or easy.
You can choose whether or not to keep these pages in your navigation structure if you like, although I'd recommend removing them from your internal search results pages.
That's just my experience, but there's a great discussion thread on this Whiteboard Friday post (which I refer people to all the time): http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-expired-content
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
-
Why is my inner pages ranking higher than main page?
Hi everyone, for some reason lately i have discovered that Google is ranking my inner pages higher than the main subfolder page. www.domain.com/subfolder --> Target page to be ranked
Technical SEO | | davidboh
www.domain.com/subfolder/aboutus ---> page that is currently ranking Also in the SERP most of the time, it is showing both links in this manner. www.domain.com/subfolder/aboutus
-----------www.domain.com/subfolder Thanks in advance.1 -
Site architecture? I've got a free user report, that shoots back a page with their data for them to share with co-workers and friends.
Hi, I have a site about to go online that users can run a free report that connects to their calendar app to get 12 months of statistics for their meetings, and then it shoots out a report. So they go to a.com/freereport and they get back a.zom/freereport/report/xxxxxx The content of those reports is different, but the structure is the same as it is a fun way to show off meeting stats to co-workers and friends. I don't see the point of Google indexing those as the traffic to those pages is going to be from social networks and viral, but I do want the backlink credit. Will I get backlink credit if I nofollow that folder? I am having a hard time deciding what to do seo wise and would love some thoughts and advice, what would you recommend? Do nothing fancy. Mark the report folder no follow. Try to do something with rel=cannonical to point those pages to the root page? Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | bwb0 -
Site:www.domainname.com - does not find homepage in Google (only inner pages - why?)
When I do a Google search on site:www.domainname.com, my clients homepage does not appear. Other inner pages do. The same thing happend a while ago and I did 'fetch by google' in Search Console. After that the homepage was indexed again when I did a site:www.domainname.com search. But now (2 weeks later), it's gone again. When I search on the brand name of the website in Google it does find the homepage. I don't know why it doesn't find the homepage when I do a site: search. Any ideas? [see images where you can see the problem] XTrDn 2doHF
Technical SEO | | robk1230 -
Is it easier to rank high with a front page than a landing page?
My product is laptop and of cause, I like to rank high for the keyword "laptop". Do any of you know if the search engines tends to rank a front page higher than a landing page? Eg. www.brand.com vs. www.brand.com/laptop
Technical SEO | | Debitoor0 -
One page of the site disappeared from serp for a month now
Im working on a clients site and been promoting a specific page to a keyword. started to move up the ranks and exactly a month ago on the 19/5 ( on the same day of the last update) updated the main page im working on with new content and published some other new pages on related subjects that all are linking to the main page im working on ( without the same anchor text in the links ) on the same day i found out that because of a technical error the new content was published on 5 other pages of the site and obviously created a duplicate content issue and i removed all the duplicates on the same day , i assume G caught this thing and punished the site for the duplicate content issue but : when i search the page directly with site:...i can find it. its been a month since i fixed all issues that i thought could impact the page..no duplicate content on the site. no KW stuffing. no spammy links to the page. everything seems fine now my question : why is my page not showing ? how long should i wait before giving up and creating a new page .? how come my site has not lost any organic traffic ( apart from that specific page ) ? is it possible to penalize only one page ? can i recover from this at all ? thanks
Technical SEO | | nira0 -
Partial Site Move -- Tell Google Entire Site Moved?
OK this one's a little confusing, please try to follow along. We recently went through a rebranding where we brought a new domain online for one of our brands (we'll call this domain 'B' -- it's also not the site linked to in my profile, not to confuse things). This brand accounted for 90% of the pages and 90% of the e-comm on the existing domain (we'll call the existing domain 'A') . 'A' was also redesigned and it's URL structure has changed. We have 301s in place on A that redirect to B for those 90% of pages and we also have internal 301s on A for the remaining 10% of pages whose URL has changed as a result of the A redesign What I'm wondering is if I should tell Google through webmaster tools that 'A' is now 'B' through the 'Change of Address' form. If I do this, will the existing products that remain on A suffer? I suppose I could just 301 the 10% of URLs on B back to A but I'm wondering if Google would see that as a loop since I just got done telling it that A is now B. I realize there probably isn't a perfect answer here but I'm looking for the "least worst" solution. I also realize that it's not optimal that we moved 90% of the pages from A to B, but it's the situation we're in.
Technical SEO | | badgerdigital0 -
If I redirect my WordPress blog to my main site, will it help my main site's SEO?
I have separate sites for my blog and main website. I'd like to link them in a way that enables the blog to boost my main site's SEO. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks in advance for any advice...
Technical SEO | | matt-145670