What to do with non-existing products (removed products)?
-
Hello,
I'm selling unique products - only one of a kind of each product.
This means that whenever a product is sold, it is removed from display.In order not to upset Google by keep removing indexed pages I created a "sold items" page which links to all of the removed products.
The problem is (or maybe it's not a problem) is that I got to the point where I have more "sold items" then existing items (and the list keeps adding up).
What should I do with the non-existing items?
Was I correct?---------------------------------------- ADDED INFO ---------
The way the site is built is that I have main category pages and each of them is showing a large amount of products. Most of these products got indexed by Google. Each product has its own unique URL (Products do not return...)
Once a product is sold it does not come up in the product categories - I only have a general "sold items" in the footer that shows all of them (with a lot of pagination).
Since the products are rapidly changing, i thought it would upset Google to have a hundred 301 redirects in each week or two.
Since the products are very similar to one another (only different measurements / colors etc.), I thought of having a link from a sold Item to a similar available item so if Google will direct someone it will probably be to the available product.
The problem is that the sold items are now 4 times more than the number of available items... I don't think that a store should display 2008's t-shirts on 2012...
Another problem that may rise with so many products is that I'm afraid that the one type of product that is being sold much more often will take charge at the end on the entire site since I will end up with 8,000 sold items of this product, 1000 sold items of other products and 1000 available misc products... this might also start causing duplication problems as the products are quite similar.
Should I stop with the "Sold" products and use 301's?
Thanks
-
Creating 301 to non-existing products is easy (technically speaking) - are you sure that it not considered a bad thing by Google? (pages keep being removed).
Thanks again
-
301 it to the most appropriate substitute. I think it'll be easier to manage your redirect list than to juggle so many pages. You should see the impact in analytics, especially if you are tracking eCom and/or goals. Bounce rates will probably come down and time on page go up. Good luck on this.
-
Dear Chas,
You are actually correct - Google often sends people to the sold items pages and while I assumed that they will look for a similar product - they actually bounce! This is why I thought that if I will add a one way link from a sold Item to an available item Google will direct them to the available item.
About redirection - I can do that but it will be lots of redirections - products are rapidly changing.
Maybe I really should simply remove a product completely when it is sold (make it unreachable from the website - no links to it at all) and have a 301 on it and call it a day... What do you think?
-
True, if the more desirable goal is building page authority rather than selling product. "Sold out" or "out of stock" invites a bounce.
Both could be achieved with a link to a like product from the sold out page, but from a real world eCom standpoint asking product maintenance staff to insert contextual links in product copy is to invite errors or indifference - most platforms have a user friendly redirect mechanism.
-
see update on top. Thanks
-
see update on top. Thanks
-
Hi Chas,
If a product is likely to come back in the future, I'd strong suggest against redirecting the product at-all. Simply leave it to build authority whilst inactive but do display a message saying that it’s not available for purchase.
-
As SEOconsult noted, knowing a little more about the nature of your products would be helpful. I'll make an assumption that these products, while unique, have a relationship or similarity with other products you have. You could judiciously use 301 redirects (or possibly a 302 if you expect the non-existent item to eventually reappear). This is especially important if an item has acquired an external link. Eventual kill the 301 when the SEs have cleansed their index of it.
Situations like this are very common for eCom retailers - 2011 Fall Sweaters are no longer relevant (or available) - but for a good UX you'd want a searcher who found you (your sweaters) through a SERP to be redirected to a similar product (2012 Spring Sweaters).
Having a page of sold items may do you better service as a means of demonstrating credibility to potential customers as a trusted purveyor who has sold many items of XXXXXX. As for upsetting Google by removing indexed pages, quite the contrary - by removing pages and using redirects, you're telling Google come back frequently, this site is dynamic and changes often, therefore it is current and more relevant than a static, unchanging site.
-
Hi there,
Would you be able to give us an example URL (if you don't want to mention the URL in-case this page ranks for the site, perhaps you could link to a pastebin.com page containing a URL)?
Do the individual products have their own URL?
If so, I wouldn't worry about having a page for "sold items", unless of-course that's the only section of the site that mentions the said products.
Without looking at the site, I'd expect there to be categories within the site and within the categories there would be products and each product would have it's own individual page. If that's the case, there should be no need for a page listing "sold items". I'd suggest that the sold items are kept within the category that they're meant for so that they're still linked to internally; perhaps at the bottom so that the active products are at the top and the inactive are at the bottom?
If you could explain how the site works a little further (or provide a URL, I'll be able to give you a more relevant answer).
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
-
Beta Site Removal best practices
Hi everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
We are doing a CMS migration and site redesign with some structural changes. Our temporarily Beta site (one of the staging environments and the only one that is not behind firewall) started appearing in search. Site got indexed before we added robots.txt due to dev error (at that time all pages were index,follow due to nature of beta site, it is a final stage that mirrors live site) As an remedy, we implemented robots.txt for beta version as : User-Agent: *
Disallow: / Removed beta form search for 90 days. Also, changed all pages to no index/no follow . Those blockers will be changed once code for beta get pushed into production. However, We already have all links redirected (301) from old site to new one. this will go in effect once migration starts (we will go live with completely redesigned site that is now in beta, in few days). After that, beta will be deleted completely and become 404 or 410. So the question is, should we delete beta site and simple make 404/410 without any redirects (site as is existed for only few days ). What is best thing to do, we don't want to hurt our SEO equity. Please let me know if you need more clarification. Thank you!0 -
Does removal of internal redirects(301) help in SEO
I am planning to completely remove 301 redirects manually by replacing such links with actual live pages/links. So there will be no redirects internally in the website. Will this boost our SEO efforts? Auto redirects will be there for incoming links to non-existing pages. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Inactive Products - Inactive URLs
Hi, In our website www.viatrading.com we have many products that might be in stock or not depending on availability. Until now, when a product was not available anymore, we took this page down (and redirected to its product category page). And, only if the product was available again, we re-activated the URL - this might be days, months or even years later. To make this more SEO-friendly, we decided now that while a product is not available, instead or deactivating/redirecting the page, we will leave it online and just add a message saying "This product is currently not available". If we do this, we will automatically re-activate about 500 products pages at once. 1. Just to make sure, is it harmful for SEO to keep activating/deactivating URLs this way? 2. Since most of these pages have been deindexed for a long time due to being redirected - have they lost all their SEO juice? 3. How can we better activate these old 500 pages - is it ok activating them all at once? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading11 -
Product or Shop in URL
What do you think is better for seo and for sale, I am using woo-ecommerce for health products website. websitename.com/product/keyword OR websitename.com/shop/keyword
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MasonBaker0 -
Dealing with close content - duplicate issue for closed products
Hello I'm dealing with some issues. Moz analyses is telling me that I have duplicate on some of my products pages. My issue is that: Concern very similar products IT products are from the same range Just the name and pdf are different Do you think I should use canonical url ? Or it will be better to rewrite about 80 descriptions (but description will be almost the same) ? Best regards.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AymanH0 -
How Do You Remove Video Thumbnails From Google Search Result Pages?
This is going to be a long question, but, in a nutshell, I am asking if anyone knows how to remove video thumbnails from Google's search result pages? We have had video thumbnails show up next to many of our organic listings in Google's search result pages for several months. To be clear, these are organic listings for our site, not results from performing a video search. When you click on the thumbnail or our listing title, you go to the same page on our site - a list of products or the product page. Although it was initially believed that these thumbnails drew the eye to our listings and that we would receive more traffic, we are actually seeing severe year over year declines in traffic to our category pages with thumbnails vs. category pages without thumbnails (where average rank remained relatively constant). We believe this decline is due to several things: An old date stamp that makes our listing look outdated (despite the fact that we can prove Google has spidered and updated their cache of these pages as recent as 2 days ago). We have no idea where Google is getting this datestamp from. An unrelated thumbnail to the page title, etc. - sometimes a picture of a man's face when the category is for women's handbags A difference in intent - user intends to shop or browse, not watch a video. They skip our listing because it looks like a video even though both the thumbnail and our listing click through to a category page of products. So we want to remove these video thumbnails from Google's search results without removing our pages from the index. Does anyone know how to do this? We believed that this connection between category page and video was happening in our video sitemap. We have removed all reference to video and category pages in the sitemap. After making this change and resubmitting the sitemap in Webmaster Tools, we have not seen any changes in the search results (it's been over 2 weeks). I've been reading and it appears many believe that Google can identify video embedded in pages. That makes sense. We can certainly remove videos from our category pages to truly remove the connection between category page URL and video thumbnail. However, I don't believe this is enough because in some cases you can find video thumbnails next to listings where the page has not had a video thumbnail in months (example: search for "leather handbags" and find www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather - that video does not exist on that page and has not for months. Similarly, do a search for "handbags" and find www.ebags.com/department/handbags. That video has not been on that page since 2010. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharieBags0 -
Magento Hidden Products & Google Not Found Errors
We recently moved our website over to the Magento eCommerce platform. Magento has functionality to make certain items not visible individually so you can, for example, take 6 products and turn it into 1 product where a customer can choose their options. You then hide all the individual products, leaving only that one product visible on the site and reducing duplicate content issues. We did this. It works great and the individual products don't show up in our site map, which is what we'd like. However, Google Webmaster Tools has all of these individual product URLs in its Not Found Crawl Errors. ! For example: White t-shirt URL: /white-t-shirt Red t-shirt URL: /red-t-shirt Blue t-shirt URL: /blue-t-shirt All of those are not visible on the site and the URLs do not appear in our site map. But they are all showing up in Google Webmaster Tools. Configurable t-shirt URL: /t-shirt This product is the only one visible on the site, does appear on the site map, and shows up in Google Webmaster Tools as a valid URL. ! Do you know how it found the individual products if it isn't in the site map and they aren't visible on the website? And how important do you think it is that we fix all of these hundreds of Not Found errors to point to the single visible product on the site? I would think it is fairly important, but don't want to spend a week of man power on it if the returns would be minimal. Thanks so much for any input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
Why does google not show my ecommerce category page when I have the same keywords for many products in the product title?
I have found that google removes the google serach listing of a category from my site (ecommerce) when products within the category have the same key words. I sell golf shirts and have a category called "Mens Golf Shirts" Within the category I have added many products but when the too many of the products say mens golf shirt my link on google gets removed. Before i had products named: FUNKTION Mens Short Sleeve Golf Shirt Red / Black but now I have had to change it to: FUNKTION Red / Black I can understand that they may see this a keyword stuffing but how do I get around this to ensure that each product can rank on google for mens golf shirt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | funktiongolf0