Removing entire site sections categories from an ecommerce store, best practices ?
-
Hi
Whats best practice when removing entire site sections from an e-commerce store due to ending those lines and not having similar alternative pages to redirect them too ?
Should you remove pages in GWT etc ?
Any other measures to prevent probs such as 404 spikes etc ??
Cheers
Dan
-
grt thanks Dennis
yes that what i meant
-
Hi Dan
Not quite sure what you meant.
Just remove them from the category that you'll be removing. 301 their old URL if it changes but if it doesn't then there's no need to.
-
thanks for your comments Richard & Dennis
what about sub categories and pages that do still exist either under other categories in the case of sub cats, or under sub cats in the case of some products ? I take it they need 301 redirecting if different url, but if flat naviagation url format used then i take it no 301 needed since its the same address ?
cheers
dan
-
Gather all the pages/urls. Send them to a blog post/news post why it's not there anymore then make it easy for them to get to your other pages. OR you can just redirect them to the home page, which Richard also mentioned.
-
If you have a relevant category I would redirect them there. If not, just send them to the homepage. You don't want to see 404s and neither do the people visiting your site.
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
-
Potential new URL structure for my ecommerce site
At the moment my site suffers from a flat product category structure where over 600 items fall into one category alone. This category is then filtered using a faceted search which appends query strings to the category URL and changes the products displayed on the page. At the moment our product category URL is as follows, www.domain.com/category/greeting-cards and this holds all cards including occasions such as anniversary, birthdays etc and also themes such as animal cards, contemporary cards etc I have proposed changes to my developer to change this structure to include subcategories. I can now go two subcategories deep. For example, "greeting cards > occasions > birthday cards" or "greeting cards > themes > animals". This is reflected in the new URL structure, which has been proposed, www.domain.com/greeting-cards/occasions/birthday-cards. In this URL do I need "occasions" in the URL as I don't think it adds much value to the user? Would I be better of having www.domain.com/greeting-cards/birthday-cards. If a user searches for "birthday cards" then I think this would be more relevant?
On-Page Optimization | | joe-ainswoth0 -
Moving Site from HTTP to HTTPS
Hi, So the news is that Google has started giving more importance to sites with HTTPS i.e. it is now a new ranking signal. It says that as of now it affects fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high quality content but it may decide to strengthen it as they would like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web. In that case, what should we do? Switching from http:// to https:// means change in urls and low traffic. How to cope with it? Do we have to implement 'n' number of redirects? Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | IM_Learner3 -
What is the best way to change keywords?
I have a client who is moving and I'll need to redirect their site to a new city. Taking local out of the picture, what is the best way to convert the site? Here are somethings I've already done. Changed the title keywords Ensured the page grade is an A for the new keywords. Changed the alt tags on images on the front page. Since I made these changes, the website has actually fallen in ranks from what it was initially ranking for the new city (the website was already ranking organically on page 2 and has dropped to mid page 3.) Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | jonnyholt0 -
Is G clever enough to not consider many instances of a category kw on a category page as kw stuffing ?
Hi Say you have a category page on your ecommerce store for a range of a brands products you sell, say brand is called "Cool Surfboards" and is hence the pages target keyword. This page is being populated by name, image and snippet/description for each of the brands different products in the range, such as: "Cool Surfboards HiFive", "Cool Surfboards Rad" , " Cool Surfboards XYZ" etc etc etc Since there are many products in the range the kw is being repeated aprox 20 times. The page is scoring an A grade but obviously failing in regard to keyword stuffing. However if you remove the brand and rename the products by model name only then the sub product specific pages will fail to be optimised for 'brand and model' and it would seem silly to not name the product what it actually is. So the question is, i take it Google is clever enough to ignore kw stuffing in these types of instances since its not actually kw stuffing and hence should leave as is ? Or will G consider it stuffing/over optimised and you should remove the brand name for the individual product names to prevent this ? cheers dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Ecommerce- Keyword use in Product links on Category page
I'm wondering how Keyword use in Product links on Category pages can affect a pages rank? I have 1 site where this seems to be an issue but not on all categories. For this site, a site: keyword search ranks the category page as no.1 in the SERPS but a non-site: search shows 1 of the many products within the category as the highest ranking page (currently 20 in google) on this site. This product is probably the least likely to generate a conversion due to it's cost so this is less than ideal. The plural search of the keyword shows the category page and it ranks higher than the keyword itself (currently 9 in google) Category name and URL = keyword. The category is paginated with 12 products per page. Product URL and anchor text is brand-model-type (where type = keyword) I'd like to keep the product URLs and anchors as they are if I can as they are well searched terms themselves but I want to optimize a category page to rank for the keyword itself. Have any of you overcome a similar issue? Would adding more text to the category page dilute the issue?
On-Page Optimization | | MarcOZ0 -
What is the best way to integrate our blog into our ecommerce website?
Hi all, We run an eCommerce website at www.oursite.com plus a blog (including news / articles / reviews / how-to guides etc.) at blog.oursite.com (those aren't really our site URLs, BTW ;-). For SEO reasons previously discussed on here, and for ease of use for our customers / browsers, we now want to integrate the two more closely. This will mean: Our blog will move to www.oursite.com/blog We will try to feature the blog content in places where it is relevant to customers (so e.g. news and blog posts about shoes would appear on our shoes category page, a review of some Adidas XL1000 shoes would appear on the Adidas XL1000 shoes product page) The blog is currently run on a wordpress.com site, so we'll need a new CMS (or wordpress.org) to get more control of the data. My issues are that, although it's good from a users point of view, having blog articles appear in lots of different places on the site might cause issues with duplicate content from a search engine's point of view. Has anyone got any pointers on how to integrate the two in a way that will make most use of the good original content coming out of our blog, while not "watering it down" by spreading it around too much? Can anyone point to examples of shops that do this well? Is there any software (other than Wordpress) that people would recommend using? As always, any help greatly appreciated! Alex
On-Page Optimization | | reddogmusic0 -
SSL sites and SEO
I'm seeing a lot about how SSL sites can negatively affect SEO from the analytics perspective, but if duplicate content issues are addressed and load times are OK, what else is there to worry about? Any advice is much appreciated. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | PerfectPitchConcepts0 -
Site Stucture Advice - Keyword Dillema
I am creating a new site and am looking for some advice on how to structure the site Using Google's keyword search tool it seems like I have a dilemma in that about 50% of the keyword pairs are contained in 10 keyword pairs that are similar The first two pairs have about 49% of the traffic and only differ between plural / singular, not quite sure how to handle that, or if google has a method to make these more or less synonomous The last 8 pairs are roughly similar in distribtuion As an example (not my case, just for visualization) Mountain Bike Classes Mountain Bike Instruction Mountain Bike Workshops Mountain Bike Training Etc ... which all more or less give the same results (yes some difference but they all deal with learning how to ride a mountain bike, again this is not my exact case, don't care a whit about mountain bikes 😉 I don't see giving each of those kinds of pairs their own page since the content would be pretty much the exact same, making it substantially different would also be problematic (if I am thinking about this correctly) I have a clean slate to work with from a site perspective so I am wondering how people here would, or better yet have handled similar situations
On-Page Optimization | | bThere0