How big is the problem: 404-errors as result of out of stock products?
-
We had a discussion about the importance of 404-errors as result of products which are out of stock. Of course this is not good, but what is the leverance in terms of importance: low-medium-high?
-
They are mostly permanently out of stock / out of collection. Based on research and your reactions we want to 301 redirect them to the relevant category page. The number of 404 errors in webmaster tools are quite substancial.
The ones which are not permanently out of stock but temporarily unavailable we want to maintain the product page with a comment that the product will be orderable soon.
-
A few questions need to be answered. Primarily:
- Are these coming back in stock?
- Were these popular products?
If these products are coming back in stock, this is a big problem and you need to have your team work to find a solution to have these pages maintain a 200. You could be losing your spot in the rankings every time you run out of inventory, missing out on a lot of traffic and cross-selling opportunities.
If the products are gone and not coming back, this isn't a big problem, as it is something every e-comm deals with. Having a plan to handle this is important though.
Some basic options include:
- Keep out of stock product pages active on web, serving up a 200. Be sure the content is updated clearly to show that the item is Out of Stock and it also serves up a bunch of additional, closely related alternative
- Let the removed products 404. Redirect these URLs to the parent subcategory level. This is possible for sites with a moderate amount of SKUs and low turnover.
- Let the removed products 404. Hand pick the popular products to set-up 301 redirects for to subcategory or similar product. Maintain by watching 404s in Google Webmaster Tools, looking for 404 pages in OSE/ahrefs, etc.
-
Are the products discontinued or out of stock? In my opinion, the 404 errors are only detrimental to your SEO when they are in an overabundance. Relevant 404 errors are important, not just for Google, but for the searcher as well. They need to know that a product has been discontinued. If a product is just out of stock, I wouldn't 404 it at all.
This is a video by Matt Cutts on how Google handles 404 errors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oya9Pl7ukNo
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
-
Product photo links appear in search results
Since I'm new, I don't have any information. Product photo links appear in the search results. Is this a problem? because when you click on the link, it does not take you to a page, but to a blank page with only a photo. What should I do for this situation?
Technical SEO | | UgurKarabulut0 -
Are all tabs the result of JS?
Hey all, Bit of a novice here, so bare with me. We have a page that has a lot of content in a tabular format that struggles to rank. I created a similar page, without the tabular format, which vastly outranks it, despite having a miniscule backlink profile in comparison. Now, I've always been under the impression that anything interactive on a website, like tabs, are the result of JS. However, I can't see any JS in the code (but as mentioned, I'm far from an expert). Code below. Description insert copy here, click on [insert anchor text](/media/MODULES AVAILABLE 2017-18.xlsx)
Technical SEO | | SwanseaMedicine
more copy here. Anyone able to shed any light? Cheers, Rhys0 -
Robots.txt error
Moz Crawler is not able to access the robots.txt due to server error. Please advice on how to tackle the server error.
Technical SEO | | Shanidel0 -
Duplicate content on Product pages for different product variations.
I have multiple colors of the same product, but as a result I'm getting duplicate content warnings. I want to keep these all different products with their own pages, so that the color can be easily identified by browsing the category page. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | bobjohn10 -
SEOMoz Crawling Errors
I recently implemented a blog using WordPress on our website. I didn't use WordPress as the CMS for the rest of our site just the blog portion. So as an example I installed Wordpress in http://www.mysite/blog/" not in the root. My error report in SEOMoz went from 0 to 22e. The Moz bot or crawler that SEOMoz uses is reporting a ton of 4xx errors to strang links that shouldn't exist anywhere on the site. Example: Good link - http://www.mysite/products.html Bad link reported by SEOMoz - http://www.mysite/blog/my-first-post/products.html I've also noticed that my page speed as become much slower as reported by Google. Does anybody know what could be happening here? I know that typically it's better to install WordPress in the root and use it to control the entire site but I was under the gun to get a blog out. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TRICORSystems0 -
Advice on strange URL problem
I'm considering doing some pro bono work for a local non-profit and upon initial review they have a number of serious issues but there is one in particular I'd like to check my thinking on. The developer who set up the site some years ago implemented a javascript redirect on their root domain so that it redirects to: http://domain.com/wordpress This is wrong for all kinds of reasons and I want to recommend eliminating this redirect and getting rid of the 'wordpress' part of the path altogether. However, the site is quite established with good PR and they would take a hit by changing the path. I'd do 301 redirects to the new URLs that would not have 'wordpress' in the path in addition to other remediation. My question - is my thinking here good? It's worth it, right? The other option is just get rid of the weird redirect and keep 'wordpress' in the path but this seems unacceptable to me. Any opinions?
Technical SEO | | friendlymachine0 -
Authorship and picture in search results
Tim and Kris Hallbom at this site: nlpca(dot)com are authors of several books and many great articles, and they would like their picture to show up in their search results. Articlebase.com contacted us and called it authorship, and said that they could get our picture to begin showing up in appropriate google searches. But we don't want to go through Articlebase.com, how do we do this? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | BobGW0 -
Product category paging
Hi, My product categories have 2-3 pages each. I have paging implemented with rel=next and rel=prev. from some reason Google GWT now reports the pages as having duplicate titles and description. Should I be worried? Should I set a different title like "blue category - page x" ? Thanx, Asaf
Technical SEO | | AsafY0