Ecommerce site product link. How to handle a link that doesn't exist.
-
Suppose we have this product A, and we just have a single item for this. When the item is sold out we do not want to show it on the website saying "out of stock". Instead we would like to remove the product from out store which will now result in a url that doesn't exist.
And google webmaster tool and Moz analytic will show them as page not found after they crawl over the site. Should i be generating a new sitemap.xml and update ?
How do i handle those pages that don't exist anymore ?
Thanks
-
Hi,
So you have a few options.
1. Create a non-product page that list similar items and an no-longer available. This gives the users a notice they arrived at the right page but were too late. Along with actionable options it may convert into sales of similar items.
2. 301 the url to the parent category, this is a flat out redirect and maybe the easiest to setup but I don't like the user experience it provides, it does give the benefit of passing the link juice back to the parent.
3. Meta Tag NoIndex this is a pretty much a search engine only fix, it doesn't pass the link juice anywhere but prevents errors from getting to search engines and crawlers.
You can read more about my thoughts and some other opinions on a similar question posted last week here:
I hope this helps and good luck,
Don
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
-
What would be causing our linking domains and inbound links to decline?
I am noticing a decline in the number of our linking domains and inbound links from month to month. It isn't drastic but looking like a trend. Any reason why this would happen? I'm not sure where to start. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | amanda_feagle0 -
Moz Crawl shows over 100 times more pages than my site has?
The latest crawl stats are attached. My site has just over 300 pages? Wondering what I have done wrong? RRv3fR0
Reporting & Analytics | | Billboard20120 -
Ecommerce data in universal analytics
Does any have the same issue. We are tracking e-commerce data in GA universal. We are finding that sales are being recorded on the day of the sale and again a few days later. It does only seem to be 1 or 2 sales that do this not all. Does anyone have any suggestions? Much appreciated. David
Reporting & Analytics | | Archers0 -
The client's website serves as the main referral?
Hi mozzers, I have this weird case where one of my client's first referral is its own website!! I am really confused especially that I have checked there www vs non www and the non www is redirected to the www. This means that it resolve to one version which is good! Any thoughts on why the main referral is its own site? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
An initial set up question - linking to GA
when viewing campaign it indicates there is a problem linking to our GA account but the details entered are correct. Any ideas what the problem might be - nothing on the campaign settings page gives me a clue. There is a highlighted box saying disconnect from GA but nothing else. The only thing i can think of is that the GA account was set up by a third party and we have access to view it - could it be a permissions problem?
Reporting & Analytics | | GreatGifts4Kids0 -
Haven't seen anything like this
I personally haven't seen anything like this before. I am optimizing my first worldwide page. The rank checker at seomoz and another rankchecker as well says that I achieve rankings in the Us and in the UK as well for my 2-3 word terms. However if I copy a paste a whole sentence from either of my pages (8-10 words) google can not find my site. If I put the terms in quotes than it is ok, but it still cannot find the home page. Not any sentence with or without quotes from the home page, although this page has the most incoming links. Anybody any idea how can it be?
Reporting & Analytics | | sesertin0 -
Segmenting traffic from referring sites in GA
Most of our traffic is from Referring sites, and in referring sites, job sites are sending most of the traffic. How can we segment traffic from job sites. There are about 40 such sites. We would like to receive a report which shows traffic excluding from these job sites.
Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_20050 -
Site: Query Question
Hi All, Question around the site: query you can execute on Google for example. Now I know it has lots of inaccuracies, but I like to keep a high level sight of it over time. I was using it to also try and get a high level view of how many product pages were indexed vs. the total number of pages. What is interesting is when I do a site: query for say www.newark.com I get ~748,000 results returned. When I do a query for www.newark.com "/dp/" I get ~845,000 results returned. Either I am doing something stupid or these numbers are completely backwards? Any thoughts? Thanks, Ben
Reporting & Analytics | | BenRush0