Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Removed Product page on our website, what to do
-
We just removed an entire product category on our website, (product pages still exist, but will be removed soon as well)
Should we be setting up re-directs, or can we simply delete this category and product
pages and do nothing?We just received this in Google Webmasters tools: Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs that return a 404 (Page Not Found) error.
We have not updated the sitemap yet...Would this be enough to do or should we do more?
You can view our website here: http://tinyurl.com/6la8
We removed the entire "Spring Planted Category"
-
Another amazing easy to understand and clear answer. Thank you Dirk!
As we are considering not offering spring bulbs at all anymore, I just leave it to a 404 page.
Thanks again!
-
Hi,
Both redirects & leaving as 404 (or 410) are valid options.
If you are removing this entire category & corresponding products because you stop selling them - you could put a custom 404 (or 410), explaining the visitor that the products are no longer available and you could indicate the alternative products you can offer them.
According to Google (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?hl=en)
"When you remove a page from your site, think about whether that content is moving somewhere else, or whether you no longer plan to have that type of content on your site.
- When moving content to a new URL, redirect the old URL to the new URL—that way when users come to the old URL looking for that content, they’ll be automatically redirected to something relevant to what they were looking for.
- _When you permanently remove content without intending to replace it with newer, related content, let the old URL return a 404 or 410. Currently Google treats 410s (Gone) the same as 404s (Not found). _
Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic. Such pages are called soft 404s, and can be confusing to both users and search engines."
You also might want to check this article http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882
If you still sell the products - but you moved them to another category, or if you don't sell these products anymore, but you offer very similar products, you could consider putting a 301 to the alternative categories/products. As example you stop selling white tulips "Amsterdam" - but you still have white tulips "Utrecht" - you could redirect the first to the second. They are not identical, but an acceptable alternative for most visitors.
In your specific case - I guess that you removed the category, but that it will be coming back next year. In that case, it's maybe better to keep the pages, but only remove the links to these pages. On the products themselves, you mention something like 'pre-ordering start in Jan. 2017. Check out of fall offers" and you mark them als "out-of-stock". You then just remove the links on your site to this subcategory. (this is quite similar to e-commerce shops with specific Christmas pages - these remain online all year long, but are online made visible as of September)
The reason why Webmaster tools is sending you the message that these pages are not found is just to inform you. It could well be that these 404 are unintentional, and by informing you you can take the necessary measures. If the 404 is intentional, you don't really have to do anything.
Just make sure that you also update your internal linking - to be sure that no internal links go to the pages you removed. Screaming Frog can help you to check this.
Hope this clarifies,
Dirk
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
-
Removing a canonical tag from Pagination pages
Hello, Currently on our site we have the rel=prev/next markup for pagination along with a self pointing canonical via the Yoast Plugin. However, on page 2 of our paginated series, (there's only 2 pages currently), the canonical points to page one, rather than page 2. My understanding is that if you use a canonical on paginated pages it should point to a viewall page as opposed to page one. I also believe that you don't need to use both a canonical and the rel=prev/next markup, one or the other will do. As we use the markup I wanted to get rid of the canonical, would this be correct? For those who use the Yoast Plugin have you managed to get that to work? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jessicarcf0 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Removing a large number of unnecessary pages from a site
Hi all, I got a big problem with my website. I have a lot of page, duplicate page made from various combinations of selects, and for all this duplicate content we've be hit by a panda update 2 years ago. I don't want to bring new content an all of these pages, about 3.000.000, because most of them are unnecessary. Google indexed all of them (3.000.000), and I want to redirect the pages that I don't need anymore to the most important ones. My question, is there any problem in how google will see this change, because after this it will remain only 5000-6000 relevant pages?
Technical SEO | | Silviu0 -
How to deal with duplicated content on product pages?
Hi, I have a webshop with products with different sizes and colours. For each item I have a different URL, with almost the same content (title tag, product descriptions, etc). In order to prevent duplicated content I'am wondering what is the best way to solve this problem, keeping in mind: -Impossible to create one page/URL for each product with filters on colour and size -Impossible to rewrite the product descriptions in order to be unique I'm considering the option to canonicolize the rest of de colours/size variations, but the disadvantage is that in case the product is not in stock it disappears from the website. Looking forward to your opinions and solutions. Jeroen
Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG0 -
Noindex vs. page removal - Panda recovery
I'm wondering whether there is a consensus within the SEO community as to whether noindexing pages vs. actually removing pages is different from Google Pandas perspective?Does noindexing pages have less value when removing poor quality content than physically removing ie. either 301ing or 404ing the page being removed and removing the links to it from the site? I presume that removing pages has a positive impact on the amount of link juice that gets to some of the remaining pages deeper into the site, but I also presume this doesn't have any direct impact on the Panda algorithm? Thanks very much in advance for your thoughts, and corrections on my assumptions 🙂
Technical SEO | | agencycentral0 -
Home Page .index.htm and .com Duplicate Page Content/Title
I have been whittling away at the duplicate content on my clients' sites, thanks to SEOmoz's pro report, and have been getting push back from the account manager at register.com (the site was built here and the owner doesn't want to move it). He says these are the exact same page and he can't access one to redirect to the other. Any suggestions? The SEOmoz report says there is duplicate content on both these urls: Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/ Your help is greatly appreciated! Sheryl
Technical SEO | | TOMMarketingLtd.0 -
Two websites with similar products
I have two websites with similar products with different tld.I have a keywords that is comman in both.One site is at top in google with that keyword and one is not.Can we implement 301 redirect from one domain to another domain for that keyword or google will consider it spammy?Please help me out.
Technical SEO | | Alick3000 -
Sitemap for dynamic website with over 10,000 pages
If I have a website with thousands of products, is it a good idea to create a sitemap for this website for the search engines where you show maybe 250 products on a page so it makes it easy for the search engine to find the part and also puts that part closer to the home page? Seems like google likes pages that are the closest to the home page (less clicks the better)
Technical SEO | | roundbrix0