404's and Ecommerce - Products no longer for sale
-
Hi
We regularly have products which are no longer sold and discontinued. As we have such a large site, webmaster tools regularly picks up new 404's.
These 404 pages aren't linked to from anywhere on the site any longer, however WMT will still report them as errors. Does this affect site authority?
Thank you
-
Great answers, thank you for the links!
-
410 & 404's are treated almost the same way by bots (the 410 just gives a stronger indication that the page is gone forever) - check this article http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-explains-differences-404-410-status-codes-189060 - so a 410 is also a valable option. As most sites already have a custom 404 page I guess the 404 solution is the easiest one;
I forgot to mention in my first reply - but there is also a good article on out-of-stock products on Moz: https://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content
Dirk
-
What's the thought on using a 410 server response (Gone) for products that won't be in stock on the site anymore? I've seen that strategy work to get pages out of the index. Does anyone have opposition to using that strategy? That would be assuming the page isn't linked to on the site (or other sites for that matter). I've seen that work OK for product pages buried a littler further in the site architecture.
-
Hi Dirk,
Great thank you, I don't get any on my site crawls so that's a plus!
-
It's nothing to worry about - they will disappear after a while (if you don't link to them on your site). It's quite normal to have them & they have no SEO impact (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?hl=en)
You could check this advice from Matt Cuts here: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2334932/ecommerce-seo-tips-for-unavailable-products-from-googles-matt-cutts- for larger sites he advices to use the "unavailable after" metatag (http://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2007/07/robots-exclusion-protocol-now-with-even.html)
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
-
Do I need 301's if I use HSTS in HTTP to HTTPS migration?
Just wondering if this was strong enough signal to search engines that we don't need to write a 301 rule in .htaccess.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KevinBudzynski0 -
Investigating Google's treatment of different pages on our site - canonicals, addresses, and more.
Hey all - I hesitate to ask this question, but have spent weeks trying to figure it out to no avail. We are a real estate company and many of our building pages do not show up for a given address. I first thought maybe google did not like us, but we show up well for certain keywords 3rd for Houston office space and dallas office space, etc. We have decent DA and inbound links, but for some reason we do not show up for addresses. An example, 44 Wall St or 44 Wall St office space, we are no where to be found. Our title and description should allow us to easily picked up, but after scrolling through 15 pages (with a ton of non relevant results), we do not show up. This happens quite a bit. I have checked we are being crawled by looking at 44 Wall St TheSquareFoot and checking the cause. We have individual listing pages (with the same titles and descriptions) inside the buildings, but use canonical tags to let google know that these are related and want the building pages to be dominant. I have worked though quite a few tests and can not come up with a reason. If we were just page 7 and never moved it would be one thing, but since we do not show up at all, it almost seems like google is punishing us. My hope is there is one thing that we are doing wrong that is easily fixed. I realize in an ideal world we would have shorter URLs and other nits and nats, but this feels like something that would help us go from page 3 to page 1, not prevent us from ranking at all. Any thoughts or helpful comments would be greatly appreciated. http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10005/lower-manhattan/44-wall-st/44-wall-street We do show up one page 1 for this building - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10036/midtown/1501-broadway, but is the exception. I have tried investigating any differences, but am quite baffled.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AtticusBerg10 -
Product Variations in Ecommerce: Combine or Canonicalize?
Hello, I have an ecommerce site that sells pond pumps. I have every pump separated because each pump has different flow rates, specs, and replacement parts. All of the content is original, and even the content on the pages are (more than) 15% different - so it isn't getting flagged by Moz as duplicate content. Essentially it is set up like this: Acme Pond Pumps Acme Pond Pump 100 Acme Pond Pump 200 Acme Pond Pump 300 I am wondering if it is best to leave all of the products as separate pages, or if I should canonicalize them to the category page? Will each of the pages pass link juice upward anyways? The difference between the products are the specs, parts, and model number. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evan890 -
301's, Mixed-Case URLs, and Site Migration Disaster
Hello Moz Community, After placing trust in a developer to build & migrate our site, the site launched 9 weeks ago and has been one disaster after another. Sadly, after 16 months of development, we are building again, this time we are leveled-up and doing it in-house with our people. I have 1 topic I need advice on, and that is 301s. Here's the deal. The newbie developer used a mixed-case version for our URL structure. So what should have been /example-url became /Example-Url on all URLs. Awesome right? It was a duplicate content nightmare upon launch (among other things). We are re-building now. My question is this, do we bite the bullet for all URLs and 301 them to a proper lower-case URL structure? We've already lost a lot of link equity from 301ing the site the first time around. We were a PR 4 for the last 5 years on our homepage, now we are a PR 3. That is a substantial loss. For our primary keywords, we were on the first page for the big ones, for the last decade. Now, we are just barely cleaving to the second page, and many are 3rd page. I am afraid if we 301 all the URLs again, a 15% reduction in link equity per page is really going to hurt us, again. However, keeping the mixed-case URL structure is also a whammy. Building a brand new site, again, it seems like we should do it correctly and right all the previous wrongs. But on the other hand, another PR demotion and we'll be in line at the soup kitchen. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yogitrout10 -
Help my site it's not being indexed
Hello... We have a client, that had arround 17K visits a month... Last september he hired a company to do a redesign of his website....They needed to create a copy of the site on a different subdomain on another root domain... so I told them to block that content in order to not affect my production site, cause it was going to be an exact replica of the content but different design.... The developmet team did it wrong and blocked the production site (using robots.txt), so my site lost all it's organica traffic, which was 85-90% of the total traffic and now only get a couple of hundreds visits a month... First I thought we had been somehow penalized, however when I the other site recieving new traffic and being indexed i realized so I switched the robots.txt and created 301 redirect from the subdomain to the production site. After resending sitemaps, links to google+ and many things I can't get google to reindex my site.... when i do a site:domain.com search in google I only get 3 results. Its been now almost 2 month and honestly dont know what to do.... Any help would be greatly appreciated Thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
Adding a huge new product range to eCommerce site and worried about Duplicate Content
Hey all, We currently run a large eCommerce site that has around 5000 pages of content and ranks quite strongly for a lot of key search terms. We have just recently finalised a business agreement to incorporate a new product line that compliments our existing catalogue, but I am concerned about dumping this huge amount of content (that is sourced via an API) onto our site and the effect it might have dragging us down for our existing type of product. In regards to the best way to handle it, we are looking at a few ideas and wondered what SEOMoz thought was the best. Some approaches we are tossing around include: making each page point to the original API the data comes from as the canonical source (not ideal as I don't want to pass link juice from our site to theirs) adding "noindex" to all the new pages so Google simply ignores them and hoping we get side sales onto our existing product instead of trying to rank as the new range is highly competitive (again not ideal as we would like to get whatever organic traffic we can) manually rewriting each and every new product page's descriptions, tags etc. (a huge undertaking in terms of working hours given it will be around 4,400 new items added to our catalogue). Currently the industry standard seems to just be to pull the text from the API and leave it, but doing exact text searches shows that there are literally hundreds of other sites using the exact same duplicate content... I would like to persuade higher management to invest the time into rewriting each individual page but it would be a huge task and be difficult to maintain as changes continually happen. Sorry for the wordy post but this is a big decision that potentially has drastic effects on our business as the vast majority of it is conducted online. Thanks in advance for any helpful replies!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
Do Outbound NoFollow Links Reduce the Page's Ability to Pass PageRank?
I get the recent change where adding a nofollow to one link wont increase the juice passed to other links. I'm wondering if nofollow still passes link-juice into the void. i.e. if a page has $10 of link-juice and has one link then regardless of whether this link is follow or nofollow will the page will leak the same juice? Specifically, Is this site benefitting from having a nofollow on the links in it's car buyer's checklist: http://www.trademe.co.nz/motors/used-cars/mitsubishi/diamante/auction-480341592.htm
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seomoz8steer0 -
How to Handel Fashion Jewelry Stores's Listings?
Hi ! I m working with few brands who hardly make same designs again... which is good things for my buyers.. Buy i m worrying how i can handle this keeping seo in mind? should i delete pages after product is sold out? or there is some other better way to handle this? Thanks, Vinku
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinku0