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 understanding Google Ranking System
Hi, I have too many question that I need answer to understand Google ranking system. I have been analyzing different website in different niche, but puzzling to understand how Google rank actually. Some websites have good number of backlinks with good SEO metrics, but some low SEO profiled websiites outrank good sites. I am here with my first question. I am working for one client website who sell sex toys online. So we are optimizing keywords like sex toys, buy sex toys, sex shop, sex toy store and too many keywords to rank on google.ca. My client website is cupidboutique.com. We have some competitors that I want to mention below: 1. PinkCherry: This is one of our big competitor. They have 2 domain one is for US and one is for Canada. Both websites ranking well for different keywords. Basically .ca domain is more successful than .com domain. But I am surprise why Google consider the websites for rank. If you see, both websites are identical, that means both website have same product, same category structure, and the most important all products description are duplicate on each domain. On google webmaster guideline, google mention that if 2 domain have identical content, then Google ignore the duplicate one in ranking. But still both websites ranking for different search term. I compare the SEO metrics of our domain and their .ca domain, there is not big difference. Our websites also have good number of links, good PA/DA, even more good number of social sharing than them. But our rankings are not even comparable with them. They are ranking within 20-30th on Google for different product category keywords, but not our. 2. Hushcanada: This is another website ranking well, but I a surprise how? This website is ranking on very high competitive keyword with very fewer number of backlinks. Their PA/DA, number of backlinks, social sharing all metrics are very few. Their business also established recently that is 2013, which I found through archive.org, whereas our client business has been running since 2003-2004. As a Ecommerce business website their homepage is not showing any product , their catalog can be found under "shop online" page only. There are even some more websites ranking well with very low SEO metrics in this niche. If Google is not looking for these SEO staff, then what other staff Google looks to rank website? Hope I will get some favorable answer of my question.
Social Media | | moonheart0 -
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 -
FB Sharing Contest Tracking Question?
We are going to give-a-way a PS4 through a social media contest. Likes, g+ circles and shares, but I wasn't sure if there was a problem tracking shares. I always thought I could just look at my FB posts and it would say how many shares. All I want to do is people to give someone an extra entry for sharing one of my post on his or her FB page. However, I've read that tracking shares can be difficult. I think the shares that are difficult to track are the ones beyond what I need, like if a 3rd party shared it or something, but I'm not sure. I want the contest to be as accurate as possible. Can anybody confirm or correct my thinking, please? Happy Thanksgiving Eve! Ruben
Social Media | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
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 -
G+ places/local - Company Categories and Pages question
I have two questions about google places/local and Personal/Company Pages Regarding Local and the categories section. Should you be using strictly the predefined categories they have? or should you be creating your own? Also say you're a car repair shop for instance. If you should be creating your own such as 'truck repair' should the city be in there as well 'Truck Repair New York/New York Truck Repair(keyword or location first?)' When it comes to company and personal g+ places, i understand doing the rel author and its bennefits but what is the correct way about tagging this? For instance in Wordpress, Studiopress has a section in the profile for the user g+ profile that will rel author it, and Yaost SEO says 'if you have a business page, insert it here and link your personal page as a contributor to the business page' Should we be filling in both sections? or does this cause a conflict? Adding these items is very easy to do, but would rather do it right the first time then circle back and have to correct everything. Any feedback/input is appreciated. Thanks,
Social Media | | choiceenergy0 -
Question on RyanKent's Identifying Link Penalties 2012 Article
I have a question about this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012 Specifically the Section Titled: Other Google Link Penalties _"Google often manually penalizes sites and does not inform site owners of the penalty. Furthermore, Google makes many algorithm changes each year. Most people are aware of the major algorithm changes, but you should also know Google makes about 50 algorithmic changes each month which could lead to ranking changes or an "algorithmic penalty". With the Penguin update specifically, we are unsure if there will be further refinements and rollouts as has happened with Panda. On May 25th Google rolled out what Search Engine Land calls Penguin 1.1. _ What advice is available for a site owner who wants to know if they have received a link penalty or at risk in the future? Check your anchor text distribution to see if it appears natural. You can perform a fast check in Open Site Explorer of your top 20 links as follows: Go to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ Enter in the URL of your site and press <enter>or the SEARCH button</enter> Change your drop down box settings as follows: Show [followed + 301] links from [only external] pages to [pages on this root domain]…..then press the FILTER button. These settings will remove the “nofollow” and internal links which are not evaluated by Google as part of link penalties. You will now see a list of all links to your site which may cause you to incur a penalty. For now, focus only on the Link Anchor Text column. If 50%+ of your top 10 links show the same or very similar anchor text, that is a warning sign of a very unnatural link profile. Of course, a deeper analysis is desirable but this method offers you some idea of the problem in just a few seconds. Hopefully your anchor text distribution looks more natural than the below example. Notice how all the links show anchor text? A natural distribution would show a high percentage of links with simply the site URL. When anchor text is naturally used, it is often far less than ideal." Anyway, with anchor text looking the same - would this have a negative impact if i was syndicating content to 10-15 blogs, or if i used onlyshare and did it to 50 or something. Would this impact me eventaully in a long term sense. I tend to write articles at least weekly for these sites so that i make sure i have fresh content, if me syndicating them/sharing the excerpt to my blog pages w/ anchor pages back to my main article is hurting me by having multiple pages linking back w/ the same exact anchor text, that would be a good thing to know. Any input on this would be much appreciated. Keep in mind i'm not creating 10k blogs and having one blog post on them. They are actively posted to. With my established site they seem to work great- but with a new site, would popping 10-15 links real quick like that set off any alarms? thank you, -Travis Gross
Social Media | | choiceenergy0 -
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 -
Yet another Google Plus One question: Does it affect ranking for people that you are NOT connected to?
Title pretty much explains it all. If lots of people plus one (the new verb of 2011?) a site, is that site deemed 'popular' and therefore will appear higher up the SERPS generally? Or does it only affect those with whom you are linked via Twitter/Facebook/Google+? Or is it too early to tell yet?
Social Media | | seanmccauley1