E-commerce Question
-
I have a bunch of pages that I want to remove from one of our ecommerce sites www.macdecals.com
I understand that it's recommended to check the backlinks of each of these pages to determine if they have any incoming links before removing them, to see if I should even bother doing a 301 or not. (We have a good 404 page)
What about checking if the pages have any social media interaction?
After removing these pages is it recommended to update and resubmit our sitemap.xml file to Google Webmaster Tools?
I feel like once Google Webmaster tools finds the 404s and we have resubmited a sitemap, we can mark all the issues at hand as fixed.
Thought? Are we on the right track?
-
Hey Jeff!
Was just going through some old questions I asked and realized I never gave credit for your answer!
Thanks again bud, cheers!
-
That makes sense... I didn't realize you were talking about top level categories; I thought it was more of a product page...
Post and let everyone know how it turns out...
-
Thank you
we've already checked for backlinks none of the pages have any. However some have social media shares.
We are taking out two of the top level categories and items within them. Therefore, we would have to 301 them back to the home page because we don't have the top level anymore, which I believe can raise a flag.
-
Bryan -
I just did a quick look at your site. You have a crazy amount of Google +1s.
Anyway, Google seems to have about 5,260 pages indexed, according to a quick search (see screenshot).
Google is most interested these days in creating an amazing user experience. I wouldn't worry about 100 pages, as a 301 is going to be a better quality signal to Google than 100 sudden 404 errors showing up on the page.
If you're really worried, though, and want to reduce the number, you could do a backlink check on the pages you're about to remove and see if anyone has linked in to those pages directly. 301 those, and then perhaps don't worry about the others?
-
Hi Jeff,
From my understanding a 301 should only be done if the page we are linking to is related to the page that we are eliminating. We have about 100 items that we plan on removing, our rankings are very good and we don't want to lose what we've earned.
My concern is if we do 100, 301 redirects, it might be signal to google that something funky is going on..
-
Bryan -
The best practice is to 301 those pages to a relevant top-level category page, so that Google doesn't see that links into the site from social media or other pages is broken.
You can simply let them be a 404, but that doesn't send the solid signal to Google that you're managing the pages on your site well.
Yes, once the pages are removed, I'd recommend re-generating the XML-based sitemap and resubmitting it to Google, so they don't look for those pages.
But 301s for those removed pages will eliminate any future issues with people who bookmark a page or link to it from another site.
Just my $0.02...
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
-
Question about pruning your website/blog for SEO
Hey all, So I checked out "The What, Why, and How of Pruning Your Website for SEO" and recently read ahrefs well known article on seo strategy and both really focused on the idea of removing poorly performing pages on your site for an SEO boost. I've asked this question in a few different ways before but I was hoping to get some more insight into this. If my company's blog has thousands of posts going back 5 years, 99% of which only really had pageviews on the day of their release and then after that receive no traffic, direct or organic, am I better off getting rid of (301) 99% of these posts and only sticking to/improving important/performant posts? Does anyone know how other blogs/sites deal with these sorts of issues. Where one function of the blog is to provide informative articles and the other function to post little tidbits (with barely any copy and rapid relevancy decay rate) meant to promote interaction with the blog community (like polls or one line contest winner announcements). Is this an issue of misusing the blog? For example, should the blog just be used for articles and all contests etc. be moved to social media? Thanks in advance for your insights, Roman
Social Media | | Dynata_panel_marketing0 -
I understand Authorship is Dead, but here's a question on the Google+ Profile
I guest write for some blogs, as well as several blogs I manage myself. What is the correct usage of the "Contributor to" field and the "Links" field? Contributor to: The overall blog itself and; Links: To individual blog posts themselves? Or the reverse? Thank you!
Social Media | | booboo220 -
Linkedin question
Hello Mozzers, In April we split our company in two, creating a new company in the process. We updated our Linkedin company page with the new branding etc, but I can't find anywhere we can change the url, which is still the old company trading style name. I've sent a support ticket to Linkedin, but I don't expect an answer all that fast so was wondering if any of you had experience with this problem and could point me in the right direction? Thank you so much! Amelia
Social Media | | CommT0 -
Facebook Fan Page Name Question
I know this is a silly question. But i cant find good advice on the topic anywhere. I have a company fan page with 3,500 fans. However, there were some serious changes to the company name, and i dont want to start a new fan page, because of the current fans. Any ideas on this topic? Regards!
Social Media | | JesusD0 -
E-commerce Website, 1 year on, what are the next steps?
Hi all, I'm sure i'm at the stage most people find themselves: • Site designed and built
Social Media | | ChrisAntoniou
• Products added to online store
• Basic SEO carried out, titles, tags, H1, etc
• Site has been running for almost a year and gain a little momentum http://www.internationalcheese.co.uk Now it's time to turn my attention to pro-active link-building and marketing of the site in order to build traffic and sales. My question to you guys is: What's the best way to go about implementing this next step? I have a list of links from competitor sites via OSE, what do I do with them? I try to post regularly on twitter and Facebook, but they rarely make an impact - i guess i need to look at the content i'm posting - how do i generate more engaging content? Your help is appreciated, any comments suggestions or feedback on the site design, structure, usability, links etc would be appreciated. **Can anyone share any real-world examples specifically relating to e-commerce businesses? ** The site is built and hosted on the Shopify platform which i find a pleasure to use. They allow certain on-page seo control, i think i've done as much as I can but i'm open to any suggestions The site link again is: http://www.internationalcheese.co.uk Thanks in advance! Chris1 -
Any developers (php/wordpress) out there? Quick question.
This question is directly related to SEO, but I wanted to see if there was any wordpress / php pro's out there who wouldn't mind helping me with a few quick things. The biggest one is I'm trying to move this facebook like button from where it is to the line of sharers above it. The sharers are being put in by the digg digg plug in, and the facebook button is being put in by the facebook plug in. You can see it on my site, or on this plug in. Thanks! gEOa
Social Media | | NoahsDad0 -
The Evion.Org question
Anyone using this service? Its seems like some sort of really bad affiliate marketing, which we all know is a no-go in regards to acceptable use policy for twitter. Just looking for some opinions, a client seems to really like, I seem to really not 🙂
Social Media | | Gaveltek-1732380 -
Viral Marketing Question: If you build a truly great piece of content, what are the best ways to seed it?
Say the site is a 2 year old eCommerce company that has this awesome clever infographic but not many blogger connections. What would be the best ways to get that content syndicated? What agencies are still left that do actual viral marketing now that Rand and Todd Malicoat have moved on the greener pastures?
Social Media | | zachc_coffeeforless.com0