E-commerce: Taking care of expired product pages
-
Hi,
I work for an e-commerce company in the fashion sector. As you probably know/can guess it is very popular for bloggers and other influencers to link to our products. But the problem is that our products often have a lifespan of only 2-3 months before they expire.
Is the best solution to do a 301-redirect to the closest category page for expiring product pages? To make sure we don't lose these links to 404-pages.
Or are there any other good solutions popular among e-commerce companys?
Thanks for taking your time!
-
Those have been my main thoughts aswell. And you guys responses seem to agree with that. Thank you for your contribution!
-
Since you have popular bloggers/sites linking to your products, it's definitely a good idea to think about user experience. If the site is out of stock of the original item, it may be smart to just link to overarching category (for example, if it's a t-shirt, redirect it to the "tops" page).
-
In your case it may be worth it to do this: Keep the pages accessible, show that the product is no longer in stock and then show similar products the user may be interested in instead.
If this is not possible (too complicated, site too big), I would 301 redirect to the closest category page, maybe with a notification at the top that the product is no longer available and that is why the user was redirected to the category page.
Have a look at this blog post: https://econsultancy.com/blog/65562-seo-considerations-for-discontinued-products-in-ecommerce/
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
-
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical.
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical. https://studyplaces.com/about-us/ The pages affected by this include: https://studyplaces.com/50-best-college-party-songs-of-all-time-and-why-we-love-them/ https://studyplaces.com/15-best-minors-for-business-majors/ As you can see the content on these pages is totally unrelated to the content on the about-us page. Any ideas why this is happening and how to resolve.
Technical SEO | | pnoddy0 -
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
Deal that expire what should i do?
Hey there Awesome team of Webmaster Forums, Lets assume that I have a page that have deals in it. Those deals after a certain period of time expire. What should I do with the expired pages?My opinion is this.The page keeps the same URL but inside there is a content saying "Sorry but this deal has expired .... "and have some relevant deals beneath ORRedirect to a universal expired page. Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Pages to be indexed in Google
Hi, We have 70K posts in our site but Google has scanned 500K pages and these extra pages are category pages or User profile pages. Each category has a page and each user has a page. When we have 90K users so Google has indexed 90K pages of users alone. My question is. Should we leave it as they are or should we block them from being indexed? As we get unwanted landings to the pages and huge bounce rate. If we need to remove what needs to be done? Robots block or Noindex/Nofollow Regards
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Why is my crawl taking so long?
Hi There, My crawl for albertcuyp.nl is taking very long, it started on the 10th of april. I don't know whats going on but i think 2 weeks for a crawl is extremely long. Can you help me?
Technical SEO | | KnowHowww0 -
Page for Link Building
Hello Guys, My question is about a link building process. We all know that some directories/sites do require a reciprocal link. Does it make any sense to creat a page in website exclusively to reciprocal links? And what we do with this webpage in terms of indexing, do folow, crawling...etc. Any sugestions are more then welcome 🙂 Tks in advance! PP
Technical SEO | | PedroM0 -
Page rank and ranking down
Hi I blog at Technostarry. Some 3 months back during page rank update, my page rank went down from 3 to 2. I don't know the reason behind this. And now, my traffic and ranking is also down. I am not involved in any bad SEO practices, I don't copy paste and I write original content. I am too confused as why and what has happened with my site. If someone could analyze my blog and look at my weak points then that would be great. I would like to get any suggestions to get back my ranking and also page rank back. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | technotech0 -
SEO value of WP e-Commerce Plugin
I'm doing a Wordpress project that will feature about 100 products and am thinking of using WP e-Commerce but am concerned about SEO. Does anyone have any comments on SEO strength/weakness of WP-eCommerce plugin for Wordpress?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0