E-commerce categrory out of stock items
-
Hi All,
I would like to hide all the products that are out of stock on my category pages, for example with a display:none (maybe there are better options/techniques do this....tips are welcome). The visitor has the options to reveal the out of stock items by using one of the filters, or by using a check-box "Show out of stock items".
Would this still be in line with Google's guidelines? Am I taking a risk to get a penalty cause I'm hiding content?
In my opinion it would not, cause I'm doing this to achieve a better user experience. Items are most of the time out of stock for a week not any longer.
Hope to hear from you guys.
Thanks in advance
Richard
-
Hello Richard,
That is a great question and I'm impressed by your attention to detail with regard to page-rank distribution changing as things go in and out of stock.
To answer your question, I don't think you risk being penalized for displaying in this way any more than thousands of other sites, including huge brands, risk it by using drop-down divs (e.g. "read more" , "transcript") and tabbed product description areas (e.g. "sizes", "description", "technical details", "Shipping costs") to break up the pertinent information into bite-sized chunks for the user. I work on a site that has checkboxes the user can uncheck to hide certain items if they don't wish to see them. This all uses similar coding to what you have described.
As long as you never specifically target Google (as in say "If Googlebot, then show this content, else show this other content) I think you'll be fine.
With that said, you may want to look into using a View-All rel canonical page to take care of that page-rank distribution issue you mentioned, depending on how it impacts the load-time of the page and how many links you will be sending part of your page-rank to: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html . If it were me I'd just stick to the solution you first asked about, but there are plenty of options.
Also think about the UX when a visitor lands on the out-of-stock product page. All it takes is a few quality raters or a few hundred organic visitors who land on that page while it's out of stock to give it a bad rating or a fast back-click to the SERPs and you could find yourself battling the effects of Panda, at least as far as I understand the process. Some options to improve that user experience include: Estimated date that the product will come back; ability to backorder; ability to sign up for an email alert when it gets back in stock; related product links with images.
Good luck!
Everett
-
I've made this change in September, and from the users point of view the experience is much better, I read some time ago that Google takes into account different sorting of categories,
Even when you add new products to a category, some of the others get pushed back, So I hope Google does know how to handle it.
I haven't tried to hide 'out of stock' products but I'm always careful with hiding stuff on the client side since this can be interpreted the wrong way by Google.
I think that doing it server side is better but It's the same like sorting.
The only reason to show an 'out of stock' product on top is if It's really popular and if you either know when It's coming back to stock or let the user subscribe to a 'back in stock' email.
Hops this helps
-
Thanks for your reply Asaf,
What I don't like about your solution is the fact that products keep moving between different pagination pages. This means Google will find the pages deeper in the hierarchical structure every now and then. It's hard to build a history on a specific ranking cause incoming link juice keeps changing.
Did you find out if hiding 'out of stock' items can cause a penalty?
Thanks again Asaf
-
I had the same problem,
What I finally did is to sort the products and always placing the temp out of stock products at the end of the list / or on the last page.
When a product is discontinued I remove it and 301 redirect to a similar product.
Asaf
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Moving E-Commerce Store to Subdomain?
Hi all, We have a customer who currently uses Square for their in-store point-of-sale system as well as for their e-commerce website. From my understanding, a Square site is a watered-down version of Weebly, and is proving to be highly restrictive from an SEO and content structuring standpoint. It's been an uphill battle to try and get traction for their site in SERPs. Would it be a bad idea to move the entire Square online store to a subdomain, and install WordPress on the root domain? This way their online store would remain as-is, but the primary pages on the site would be on WordPress which would give us a lot more control over the content. I just want to make sure this doesn't negatively impact their SEO. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | suarezventures0 -
Prioritizing SEO Items for a New Website Launch
Hello, a beginner SEO question I'd love to hear your perspective on. We're launching a new site and need to prioritize our SEO work. For a news site with multiple articles published daily, using RSS feeds to push stories to Google News is our top priority. Which item should we focus on next, an XML sitemap for Google, or an article directory based on our internal taxonomy that would provide backlinks for the individual posts to rank? Are XML sitemaps still relevant? Is an article directory a must-have or nice-to-have? Appreciate any suggestions you may have!
Technical SEO | | Gbtyne1 -
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
Canonical for duplicate pages in ecommerce site and the product out of stock
I’m an SEO for an ecommerce site that sells shoes I have duplicate pages for different colors of the same product (unique URL for each color), Conventionally I have added canonical tags for each page, which direct to a specific product URL My question is what happens when a product which the googlbot is direct to, is out of stock but is still listed in the canonical tag ?
Technical SEO | | shoesonline0 -
Google displaying "Items 1-9" before the description in the Search Results
We see our pages coming up in Google with the category page/product numbers in front of our descriptions. For example: Items 1 - 24 of 86 (and than the descriptions follows). Our website is magento based. Is there a fix for this that anyone knows of? Is there method of stopping Google from adding this on to the front of our Meta Description?
Technical SEO | | DutchG0 -
How big is the problem: 404-errors as result of out of stock products?
We had a discussion about the importance of 404-errors as result of products which are out of stock. Of course this is not good, but what is the leverance in terms of importance: low-medium-high?
Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG0 -
Are the duplicate content and 302 redirects errors negatively affecting ranking in my client's OS Commerce site?
I am working on an OS Commerce site and struggling to get it to rank even for the domain name. Moz is showing a huge number of 302 redirects and duplicate content issues but the web developer claims they can not fix those because ‘that is how the software in which your website is created works’. Have you any experience of OS Commerce? Is it the 302 redirects and duplicate content errors negatively affecting the ranking?
Technical SEO | | Web-Incite0 -
E-ccomerce SEO conundrum
I work on the marketing for an eccomerce website. And lately we have been having an issue with the "wrong" page ranking and the right page "being nearly unfindable." For example the product bit o honey - there is a brand page, category page and individual product pages. We want the category page to be the top level bit o honey "hub" page and have placed all of the products onto it. We've written a nice description about Bit O Honey on that page and spent time running social campaigns around that page to try and get social activity on page as well. There have even been a few back links from blogs or reviews onto that category page. It also has the highest page authority among all of the bit o honey pages. But for some odd reason it is always the absolute last result among the 3 options when i search? In fact the only time I can even find it is if I type in about 3 sentences worth of text from that page and it find exact match. I'm really pretty confused as to why the highest page authority page with the most content, activity and link profile, would have the worst ranking capability among the three nearly identical pages.
Technical SEO | | Jonathan_Murrell0