What are best SEO practices for product pages of unique items when the item is no longer available?
-
Hello, my company sells used cars though a website.
Each vehicle page contains photos and details of the unit, but once the vehicle is sold, all the contents are replaced by a simple text like "this vehicle is not available anymore".
Title of the page also change to a generic one.
URL remains the same.I doubt this is the correct way of doing, but I cannot understand what method would be better.
The improvement I am considering for pages of no longer available vehicles is this:
keep the page alive but with reduced vehicle details, a text like: this vehicles is not available anymore and automatic recommendations for similar items.
What do you think? Is this a good practice or do you suggest anything different?
Also, should I put a NOINDEX tag on the expired vehicles pages?
Thank you in advance for your help.
-
Dear Oznappies, Sheldon, James, thank you very much.
I will try to proceed as follows:
keep the vehicle page with minimum information, indicate that the the item is sold and show links to similar and related vehicles that the customer might find interesting. Also, I'll put NOINDEX tag on the page (I prefer the search engine to send users to pages of items that are available).
Thank you!
-
I agree with Oznappies' recommendation... tell them "this vehicle has been sold, but we have other similar models". Personally, I would offer them a link to similar models and a Back link, as some people will take exception to being led to a different car than the one they wanted to see. I would definitely not get rid of the old content, however. I would simply do a noindex follow.
-
If you only show the car image they were originally looking for and also the current ones available in 'mustang' then that would work for cross or upselling the customer. It could also give them the idea to get in quick if they like a particular vehicle, before it sells to. You could get fancy and track the click throughs on a give vehicle and show a heat map of level of interest, but that only works if you get reasonable interest on most vehicles.
-
Personally I'd keep all the old pages, and on them show a list of similar cars.. so if it was a Mustang, show other mustangs, etc.
-
Thank you, that's a good idea. So do you advise against keeping old vehicle pages available?
-
It does depend on if you have similar cars to sell. If so you could create a page with links to other vehicles that a buyer may be interested in and then add a 301 redirect to the new page. Depending on what your site developers are using, they could include an optional heading to specify that 'car xyz is no longer available, but we have many others' where xyz is determined from the refering page. This would give the new page where you have similar vehicle SEO juice and keep your customers infromed of what is in stock.
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
-
Too many SEO changes needed on a page. Create a new page?
I've been doing some research on a keyword with Page Optimization. I'm finding there's a lot of changes suggested. I'm wondering that because of the amount of changes required is it better to create a new page entirely from scratch that has all the suggestions implemented OR change the current page? Thanks, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris29181 -
SEO implications of using Marketing Automation landing pages vs on-site content
Hi there, I'm hoping someone can help here... I'm new to a company where due to the limitations of their Wordpress instance they've been creating what would ordinarily be considered pages in the standard sitemap as landing pages in their Pardot marketing automation platform. The URL subdomain is slightly different. Just wondering if anybody could quickly outline the SEO implications of doing this externally instead of directly on their site? Hope I'm making some sense... Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | philremington
Phil1 -
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
Website redesign, some urls are no longer available. How do I mitigate ranking drops?
I am currently refreshing my WordPress business website. I used a theme that had a built in portfolio option. I wanted to strip down the bloat and move to something more simple to better articulate my message. Upon switching themes I will loose my urls for my portfolio projects. I should have never used this built in function but it did exactly what I needed and wanted here is an example. http://silvernailwebdesign.com/portfolio-view/central-jersey-claims-association-wordpress-consulting/ Now on my staging site these portfolio pieces have vanished and the urls are indexed with google. I could create posts and recreate the portfolio pieces however the problem with the url is the /portfolio-view/ portion. I cannot recreate the part of the url. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I receive some traffic through the portfolio pages but not much, however, I do not want to loose any traffic. I am looking for a strategy that will solve this url issue with WordPress. I have about 10 separate portfolio pages with this url issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
URL Change Best Practice
I'm changing the url of some old pages to see if I can't get a little more organic out of them. After changing the url, and maybe title/desc tags as well, I plan to have Google fetch them. How does Google know that the old url is 301'd to the new url and the new url is not just a page of duplicate content? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Pagination, Canonical Tag & Best Practices
I have an eCommerce site that dynamically creates category pages, which produce canonical tags in the header. For multiple page categories, it adds the page number to the URL. For example, this category has 3 pages.... Because most categories have too many products, I can't follow Googles suggestion of creating a "view all" page. Furthermore since all these pages use the same template, I'm unable to insert a NOINDEX tag in all the pages after the first page. Also, in this scenario, I'm unable to insert the discreet code for Next/Previous, which is also suggested by Google. My only option for maintaining these dynamically generated category pages would be to hardcode the first conical tag in the template, which would then be produced on all subsequent paginated pages. Consequently, every paginated page in this category would have the same canonical tag pointing to the first page. Would this incur the wrath of Google and would I'd be better off leaving the pagination they way it is?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
Best practice with duplicate content. Cd
Our website has recently been updated, now it seems that all of our products pages look like this cdnorigin.companyname.com/catagory/product Google is showing these pages within the search. rather then companyname.com/catagory/product Each product page does have a canaonacal tag on that points to the cdnorigin page. Is this best practice? i dont think that cdnorigin.companyname etc looks very goon in the search. is there any reason why my designer would set the canonical tags up this way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
SEO on page content links help
I run a website at the bottom we have scroller box which the old SEO guy used to contain all of the crap content so we can rank for keywords not on the page and put all of the links in to spread the link juice into the other inner category pages (some of these pages are only listed on our innerpages otherwise). We are trying to remove this content and add decent content above the fold with relevant long tail keywords in (it is currently decent but could do with expanding if we are removing this large chunk of text in theSEO box and some long tail keywords will be missing if we just remove it) we can add a couple of links into this new content but will struggle to list the category pages not on the left hand navigation. If we were to list all of the pages in the left hand nav would we dilute the power going to the main pages currently or would we be in the same position we are now? For example at the minute I would say the power is mainly going to the left hand nav links and then a small amount of power to the links in the SEO content if we put these into the nav will it not dilute the power to the main pages. Thank you for your time and hopefully your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0