I have a client whose shop will be down a few days. What would provide less impact to organic search program?
-
I have a client who is moving their warehouse, and their shop will be down for four days. I have been doing some research on the best ways to handle this and I wanted to get the communities feedback on this. One thought is to have the pages live, but people can't place an order - but this does not provide the best customer experience. Another thought is to just do temporary redirects for the shop pages, to land on the "sorry we are moving" page for customers. Another thought was to do 503 HTTP status codes on the pages and then do a temporary redirect to the landing page.
Have any of you experienced this issue? If so, what did you do to minimize the impact to the organic search programs?
NOTE: All of their static content will remain in tact. Only the shop/store will be down.
-
Remembered seeing this back in the day,
Matt Cutts Take,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eYJuT0yGrI&list=UUWf2ZlNsCGDS89VBF_awNvA
I should think you will be fine for just 4 days,
James
-
This is a large consumer brand, so it isn't a handful of people - but let me chat with them about their communication plan. Not sure what they are doing from a customer experience perspective and it would be good to note. Thank you!
So you vote with having the pages live and not order, rather than a redirect... Even for a large consumer brand?
Thanks!
-
Due to the limitations in their system (see my response to Bruce above) I have no say in having inventory or not. But, one of the options is to have all the product pages live and no option to purchase. Possibly putting a banner on the top explaining what is happening... Maybe that is a better option the the temporary redirects... I just don't know.
-
Sure! It is a large brand that has a warehouse system and inventory system hooked into its website. By moving the warehouse, they must take the shop offline. That is just a fact I have to deal with. It is not a decision I can make or can influence. But, I can influence how it is taken offline.
I can't agree more on the "give us a few extra days" solution, but their inventory system (which is hooked into its website) can't do it. Otherwise they lose their data. I don't get it, but that is the way it is...
Thanks!
-
I would personally vote for having the pages live and either not being able to place an order (with a message), or have them be able to place an order but have a message saying things will be delayed. Totally depending on your client's type of business and customers, they could also do an email or blog post or note on their home page warning people in advance of the downtime.
My husband runs a small business, and many things are custom-manufactured by us. It's a small, niche industry, and many of the people know each other. There are only a handful of forums devoted to the hobby. We had a period where we were effectively shut down for a couple of months, due to a fire at the location we were using, followed by moving. We did a blog post on our site, and then posted on all the forums letting people know what was up and that orders would be delayed. I did take the shopping cart icons off the site at that point so that people couldn't order. Thankfully, people were fairly understanding.
-
We have moved our place of business a couple of times. Big job. Everyone has also been out of the office for a conference.
Method 1) Move on Friday and have it done by Monday... maybe you can pick a three day weekend. Have a big sale on your bulky items for a couple weeks before the move. GET SOME SHELVES EMPTY. Place restocking order with supplier so that it arrives at your new location early in the week after your move.
Start moving all nonessential items on Thursday, anything that you can get out of there. Leave only what pack-and-ship people need to operate on Friday at the old location. Get minimal furniture and computers in the new location and operating on Thursday. Get empty inventory shelving at the new location ready to accept inventory. Take anything to the new location that you can.
On Friday, pack-and-ship people arrive early and get all orders picked and packed and shipped. As soon as pack-and-ship people are finished the moving team yanks their furniture and supplies and takes it to new location.Pack inventory in boxes and move shelving to new location before inventory. LABEL THE BOXES WITH SHELF NUMBERS.
Friday night, Saturday and Sunday moving team gets all shelving, inventory, and pack-and-ship supplies and furniture set up at new location. Pack-and-ship people work during the weekend to get the inventory back on the shelves as they want it. Don't let the moving crew do this or pack-and-ship people will be cussing.
Monday morning, pack-and-ship people are ready to go, starting a little early so they have extra time to be ready for your package pickup people. Pay overtime and a nice bonus for everyone's hard work.
- Method 2)... place a big face-slapping sign on every page of your site and even bigger in the checkout. "We are moving to a new location. Please feel free to shop but know that orders will not ship until (fill in date)."
-
I would agree with Bruce in that unless this is a "must have tomorrow" industry, it might be best to leave everything as is and add something that tells your customers that you're down for a few days. Why not throw up a banner on every product page that says something like "we're moving to serve you better - so orders may be delayed for a few days more than normal". We did something similar when we moved and most customers understood.
Good Luck
Ken
-
Not sure of all the facts so very hard to make a call on what to do.
Initial thoughts:- Why is moving warehouse stopping ordering? If this is because you cannot ship fast enough, extend your lead time to ship to cover these days.
To recreate an old phrase of "Out of stock is out of business" to "Offline is out of business"....if a customer makes the effort to get to the site and then cannot buy, what is stopping this and is the reason really really valid. Can you give a few more details about what why and how come?
Warmest regards
Bruce
-
Yes, I read that one. Figured it was a few years old and maybe there was another solution available.
Thanks!
-
Here's a blog post from a couple of years ago that talks about that and should be helpful in your situation. http://moz.com/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance
Best of luck!
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
-
Seeing URL Slugs as search result titles
I've been seeing some search results for my site that look like the first result here, where the URL slug is used as SERP title: https://drive.google.com/a/fitsmallbusiness.com/file/d/0B37y4RslpuY-a0hQYjlJQ0NxeFJicDF6RVlURFVSNFN0aGhB/view?usp=sharing The article title (and Yoast snippet title) are both "28 Press Release Examples From The Pros", but for some reason I'm seeing "press-release-examples" in the search results. I've seen this for multiple articles, and I see it now and then with different articles. I'm aware that Google often changes the titles in search results, but it seems very weird to me that they would opt for just the URL slug here. Thoughts? Has anyone else seen this issue? Any idea what might be causing this? All help much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | davidwaring0 -
Link's that are an internal site search?
Hi hope your're all well. I sell Red, Blue, Green Widgets within each color I have many sub types, the subtypes change all the time,and a sub type has many variations in itself. I'd like to set up links that direct customers to popular searches of sub types say: widgets.com/red/blue-spots....search string... Will Google crawl these search links and see that there is good content behind it? How does Google handle links that are also a site search? Can it be bad and should I "no follow" them? Hope someone can give me some direction on these, many thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Thea880 -
Home page not indexed by any search engines
We are currently having an issue with our homepage not being indexed by any search engines. We recently transferred our domain to Godaddy and there was an issue with the DNS. When we typed our url into Google like this "https://www.mysite.com" nothing from the site came up in the search results, only our social media profiles. When we typed our url into Google like this "mysite.com" we were sent to a GoDaddy parked page. We've been able to fix the issue over at Godaddy and the url "mysite.com" is not being redirected to "https://mysite.com" but, Google and the other search engines have yet to respond. I would say our fix has been in place for at least 72 hours. Do I need to give this more time? I would think that at lease one search engine would have picked up on the change by now and would start indexing the site properly.
Technical SEO | | bcglf1 -
Did I cause my 70% drop in organic traffic?
Held top 10 SERPS for brands over the past few years, did a site redesign on May 19th, site used to have a long left hand nav consisting of each brand I carried. Site redesign was an attempt to make it cleaner and more compact. Now the site has a top nav menu with categories based on garment type and the addition of a brand category, no fly out nav menu, these links just open the sub-category page. On the 10th I checked my SERPS and almost threw up, off the map, no where to be found at all. Would a site redesign take almost 2 months to reflect? Am I being penalized by Google(no notification in GWT). I'm lost and thinking of how to tell my landlord I'm not going to be able to pay rent in a couple weeks.
Technical SEO | | scrubcouture0 -
Accidentally blocked Googlebot for 14 days
Today after I noticed a huge drop in organic traffic to inner pages of my sites, I looked into the code and realized a bug in last commit cause the server to showing captcha pages to all Googlebot requests from Apr 24. My site has more than 4,000,000 in the index. Before last code change, Googlebot are exempt from being shown the captcha requests so each inner pages are crawled and indexed perfectly with no problem. The bug broke the whitelisting mechanism and treat requests from Google's ip addresses the same as regular users. It leads to the captcha page being crawled when Googlebot visits thousands of my site's inner pages. This makes Google thinks all my inner pages are identical to each other. Google remove all the inner pages from SERP starting from May 5th before when many of those inner pages have good rankings. I formerly thought this was a manual or algorithm penalty but 1. I did not receive a warning message in GWT
Technical SEO | | Bull135
2. The ranking for main url is good. I tried with "Fetch as Google" in GWT and realize all Googlebot saw in the past 14 days are the same captcha page for all my inner pages. Now, I have fixed the bug and updated the production site. I just wanted to ask: 1. How long will it take for Google to remove the "duplicated content" flag on my inner pages and show them in SERP again? From my experience, Googlebot revisits urls quite often. But once a url is flagged as "contains similar content", it could be difficult to recover, is it correct? 2. Besides waiting for Google to update its index, what else can I do right now? Thanks in advance for your answers.0 -
Impact issues when switching from .com to uk
Buon Giorno from wetherby UK 5 degrees C and rivers bursting their banks everywhere 😞 This site http://www.sandtoft.com/ has requested a switch in url forwardfing in that they want the following to happen: When u enter the .com url it forwards to the .co.uk domain (the opposite from what it is today ie when you eneter .co.uk it switches to the .com url) So my question is please... "Will changing the .com url to .co.uk via forwarding affect SERPS in any significant manner" My view is the impact will be a minor dip in the serps followed by a recovery. Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Advice on display this content on my page for search engines
Hi, my website http://www.in2town.co.uk/Holiday-News is about bringing travel and holiday news to our readers of our lifestyle magazine but i am having problems at the moment with the layout. What i mean by this is, i have written content on the page as an introduction so google knows what this section of the site is about but to be honest it looks rubbish with having the introduction there and i would like to know if i am doing the right thing by having the content there for google to know what my site is about. I have tried taking it away and noticed i dropped in the rankings and when i have put it back up i go up in the rankings, can anyone please give me some advice over this issue
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Site Disappeared off of Search
A friend of mine has a site (http://bit.ly/q4iWkM ) that was ranking number one for their key word (Drimnagh() and has now completely disappeared off of the ranking. I did some checking and can't see a problem. She does have duplicate meta and titles throughout but this shouldn't be a punishable offence that I know of and is something that I am going to correct with a quick plugin install. I couldn't see any redirects or code stopping search either. When you do site:URL it shows up OK as well. She is client of mine (for website not for SEO) and she is really upset about it so any help from the forum would be appreciated. This isn't even a site I did but you couldn't get a better person to work with so I am eager to help where and if possible. Guinness all round if someone solves it next time you are in Ireland
Technical SEO | | kdaly1000