Old / passed productpages
-
Hi, what shall i do with the old / passed productpages? The situation right now is, that all product url's are being saved wich cost me a lot of duplicate content and lot's of url's being indexed and crawled and no use to the website at all.
As there are affiliate links to those passed url's i want to give them a 301 to the category page wicht fitst best for a time of period?
Do you think that's the best solution? And what time of period shall ik give those 301 redirects?
Thnx and grtz, Leonie
-
Well i decided to give old product pages a 301 redirect, as long there is traffic on the url's, this wil be the best solution for this site. To leave the page up with a canonical, will create a messy site at the end. Thanx for all your replies!
Grtz, Leonie
-
Hi Erica,
yes they have, and they are shutting of those links, but still encounter 404's from the affiliate company. it's is progress
-
Definitely look at traffic and conversions, and start with those.
Also, re: affiliates, are the affiliates themselves complaining about 404s? Most any affiliate programs/management systems have the ability to shut off links. I assume they then inform affiliates to change links.
-
It takes all kinds :). I think to me maybe a learned response any time I click a link and see a redirect unless I implicitly trust the site I'm alt+f4'ing right away. I don't want popups, I don't want redirects I want to go where I say to go, even if where I said to go is empty. At least I got there and now can make a conscience choice what to do next.
Maybe just preference.
-
I would disagree, I would prefer to be taken to the sub category page to show me similar products with a message saying the product you was looking for is no longer available, please check out these very similar products - but I guess we all have different tastes and thats why as webmasters we can never please everybody
-
Thanks Donford, you really got a point to see it from a user perpective. and want to consider this also as an option and using the canonical of the parent.i'm talking about productpages that won't return anymore. For pages that will, we already cover like the way you described.
grtz, Leonie
-
Hi Leonie
I am not completely against 301's for these situations but from a user experience level I don't like when I got to X url and end up at Y url. I understand the reason from an SEO perspective but I don't like it from a user perspective. I take this into account when I make my decisions for my personal sites as well as my company's.
For e-commerce sites I prefer one of two methods. For products that "may" one day return I prefer to leave the page up, disable checkout / add to cart features and provide users similar buying choices along with an out of stock "email me when available again" option.
For products that will likely never be available again I still prefer to leave the page up, provide alternatives for them to buy, and then canonical the URL to parent. The second option works in two ways. First you don't miss the traffic from others linking to you, second you give the page's credit back to the parent category while reducing the no longer available page's chance of being a SERP result and up the parent's. Eventually the page will fall off the SERPs. Once a year you can do a sweep to see if any of the no longer available pages are getting any views if not then just remove them.
Both options provides users a better experience then "O you want to go here, O, I say you go here!" that 301's induce. I am not saying there is no place for 301's, in this sort of case I think the alternatives maybe a tad better, though maybe a little harder to implement.
-
Thanks Andy. i know affliate don't help SEO, but have 404 errors through the affiliate company, trying to solve it, but have to take care at this right now.about the time: difficult to say what's good, will monitore it the next period. 6 months sounds reasonable, though that are lots of 301 's
-
Hi
Firstly Affilaite links usually don't help towards SEO as they go through the affiliate company i.e. Awin, so the link juice actually is passed to awin, not yourself.
Once a product has sold out on our site, we 301 to the category page as this is the best user experience, while they can't get the exact product they are after at least they are still landing on a relevant section of the site - I've seen some examples where companies 301 to the homepage, but this isn't a good user experience.
Time periods for the 301s is a bit hard to say, I would track and see if they haven't had anybody click on the old link for 6 months to remove the 301 - but thats my opinion. Some would argue longer and I have spoken to others who say three months. What ever time period you do chose, keep an eye on 404 errors and if a decent number of these keep popping up, keep extending your 301 window.
Thanks
Andy
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
-
Old forum with 404s, what should I do?
Hello, So I'm helping out some friends with their SEO. I've just run a Screaming Frog crawl of their entire site (which took hours and hours I might add). They used to have a forum connected to the site, which is no longer active. Google is still indexing all of the old URLs, which unsurprisingly return 404 errors. What should they do to prevent Google from indexing these pages? That's assuming they need to do anything at all. They don't have access to these old forum posts and therefore won't be able to fix the URL or resource adding a 301 redirect pointing to the most relevant alternate page. I'm new to SEO but my instinct is that they need to have the page return a 410 ‘Gone’ response code to give search engines a clear signal that the page no longer exists and won’t be returning, and removing the internal links to that URL or resource. 1. Is this interpretation correct?
Technical SEO | | jordanayresaira
2. What is the impact of leaving these 404s? There are over a thousand, so there's a lot 3. What should I recommend?0 -
Should I set 301 Redirects or keep old permalinks?
I just built a new site for a client and the new site has pretty links like domain.com/about-us. The old site has been around for a VERY long time and had links like domain.com/aboutus. I want to do 301 redirects because from my understanding, it minimizes the negative SEO impact. But the client wants to keep the permalinks without the hyphens to match the old links. What is the best route, considering SEO? BTW, the site is still on the same domain. Thanks in advance for your help! Neik
Technical SEO | | glassh0use0 -
Is link equity passed through redirect chains?
Hi there, When redirects are passed through multiple stages e.g. https://www.google.com 301 to http://www.bing.com 301 to http://www.yahoo.com Does http://www.yahoo.com still retain all link equity from the original referring domain, and is there a limit to the redirect chain before Google starts to not pass through link equity? Cheers
Technical SEO | | Corbec8881 -
Find all external 404 errors/links?
Hi All, We have recently discovered a site was linking to our site but it was linking to an incorrect url, resulting in a 404 error. We had only found this by pure chance and wondered if there was a tool out there that will tell us when a site is linking to an incorrect url on our site? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Redirect old shop to new domain
I have an old Magento shop placed on a subdomain: http://webshop.teamout.dk/ Now I have created a new shop in another store system called ShopOrama on a new rootdomain: What is the best way to get all my already indexed sites from google to redirect to my new site with the new META title + description? I have tried the Magento > Catalog > URL Rewrite, but it contains over 500 redirects already and making custom redirects for all my sites will take a lot of time. Because of the old site being a subdomain I can't change address in GWT. I'm looking forward to your solutions
Technical SEO | | NicolaiTeglskov.dk0 -
How to handle New Page/post with site map
Hi, I've created and submitted to google (through webmaster tool) a site map with the WP plugin XML google maps. Now I've created new pages and posts. My question is: do i have to recreate and re submit another site map to google or can i just submit to google the new pages and posts with the option 'FETCH AS GOOGLE' ? Tx so much in advance.
Technical SEO | | tourtravel0 -
Redirect old URL's from referring sites?
Hi I have just came across some URL's from the previous web designer and the site structure has now changed. There are some links on the web however that are still pointing at the old deep weblinks. Without having to contact each site it there a way to automatically sort the links from the old structure www.mydomain.com/show/english/index.aspx to just www.mydomain.com Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
301 from old domain to new domain
Hi, I need to create a 301 redirect for all internal pages located on organic7thheaven.com to the homepage of our new site at http://www.7thheavennaturals.com/ Currently internal pages of the old site such as the following are returning a page not found www.organic7thheaven.com/products/deepcleansing/miraclemud.asp Can anyone help me in setting up a .htaccess file for this problem please? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MJMarketing0