Best way to handle redirection for products that come in and out of inventory.
-
We have a large volume of products that rotate seasonally. From an SEO perspective we are looking for the best method on how to handle these issues.
Currently when crawler or user encounters a URL to a product that is no longer in inventory we are looking at two things. One, the request comes in and send a 200 to a page that says ITEM NOT FOUND. Option 2, is simply send them to a 404.
The product may or may not be put back into production. What is the best method to handle this?
-
Thank you Rob for taking the time to answer. Much appreciated. That's pretty much the direction we started with. I kind of look at it like an internal search. When an internal search is made for a product that doesn't exist, they get returned to a 200 and static item not found page. So we are moving forward this same method.
Our next step is to reduce 8k 404s a week we get!
-
It really does depend on the product and type of site for sure.
-
I agree here, but with the Panda updates this past year, just having pages up won't really do much. You'll need to improve the user experience to build on the page.
I would build on the page, but look to improve the landing pages of the products that are either no longer available, or the pages that are or will still be online but with products that are not available 'at this time'.
Bring in social media, product landing pages, perhaps a posting 'comment' section for customers to review the products (to offer some user generated content), alongside other features like customized descriptions (don't copy the supplier site), features about the history of the product, the origin of it.. etc..
If it's no longer available, redirecting to a products page of similar relation will help keep the client on the site - while also offering various products of similar needs for their use.
Do all this - I and I see a win-win for you
-
I would simply keep those pages live at all times
I keep seasonal pages up... and have found that they creep up the rankings over the years. Next season they are more valuable.
-
Really depends on the products you're selling. I do like Rob's answer about keeping the page live and offering an alternative or capturing an interest list. You still want the sale or to create the lead so providing some sort of call to action is key if these are significant.
If the product is never coming back, I'd def redirect to a close match or a parent category.
-
You definately don't want to use a 404 error code, so avoid that at. There would be a lot of 301 redirects after that as Google isn't a big fan of 404 pages and it doesn't help your 'user experience'.
Because your product pages (individually) might be gaining links and resources/mentions/social mentions, etc, from customers as they find products, a 404 would produce a loss in valuable inbound linking juice into the domain.
I would simply keep those pages live at all times, but build on the pages/products description, history, talk about it's features, etc, keep those deeply seeded and index'd pages in the domain. Then when they come back online (if they do) ir provides users excellent content about the product and in parallel works with thier user experience.
If the product after time doesn't return, then just work to find a solution for those specific pages. Perhaps a directory of 'out of date products' that visitors could reference if they were looking or searching for something in particur on that site - and offer an alternative (if available) to them in it's place?
Hope this helps a little. Rob
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
-
Best Way to Handle Near-Duplicate Content?
Hello Dear MOZers, Having duplicate content issues and I'd like some opinions on how best to deal with this problem. Background: I run a website for a cosmetic surgeon in which the most valuable content area is the section of before/after photos of our patients. We have 200+ pages (one patient per page) and each page has a 'description' block of text and a handful of before and after photos. Photos are labeled with very similar labels patient-to-patient ("before surgery", "after surgery", "during surgery" etc). Currently, each page has a unique rel=canonical tag. But MOZ Crawl Diagnostics has found these pages to be duplicate content of each other. For example, using a 'similar page checker' two of these pages were found to be 97% similar. As far as I understand there are a few ways to deal with this, and I'd like to get your opinions on the best course. Add 150+ more words to each description text block Prevent indexing of patient pages with robots.txt Set the rel=canonical for each patient page to the main gallery page Any other options or suggestions? Please keep in mind that this is our most valuable content, so I would be reluctant to make major structural changes, or changes that would result in any decrease in traffic to these pages. Thank you folks, Ethan
Technical SEO | | BernsteinMedicalNYC0 -
What is the best way to handle links that lead to a 404 page
Hi Team Moz, I am working through a site cutover with an entirely new URL structure and have a bunch of pages that could not, would not or just plain don't redirect to new pages. Steps I have taken: Multiple new sitemaps submitted with new URLs and the indexing looks solid used webmasters to remove urls with natural result listings that did not redirect and produce urls Completely built out new ppc campaigns with new URL structures contacted few major link partners Now here is my question: I have a pages that produce 404s that are linked to in forums, slick deals and stuff like that which will not be redirected. Is disavowing these links the correct thing to do?
Technical SEO | | mm9161570 -
301 Redirect with index.asp
I am very new to all of this so forgive the newbie questions I will get better. Ok so after starting a campaign I see that I have many issues including where some pages are being deemed as duplicate content. 1. The report says the http://lucid8.com has duplicate content on 2 other pages 2. When I look at them it shows that http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates. 3. Really these are the exactly the same page because the default page that is opened for www.lucid8.com http://www.lucid8.com etc always opens the index.asp page. 4. Now I read that I should do permanent redirects and how to do this via IIS and I tried to do a redirect from index.asp to www.lucid8.com but that does not work because www.lucid8.com is pointing to index.asp and so we end up in a circle. So the question is how do I get rid of these duplicate page references without causing problems. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TroyW0 -
Safe way to auto geo redirect
Hi, looking for a second opinion on this please.... I own a couple of web stores, one targets UK and the other USA (they are both the same store more or less just different products targeted at different location). The uk runs on a .co.uk domain and the US on a .us domain. Is there a safe way that I could auto redirect search engine traffic to the right location? Let's say the toys page of the .co.uk is ranking well in google uk and appears high in google us too, obviously I would want the USA users to visit the toys page for the US store rather than the UK one. Ideally I would employ a geo redirect script so if a USA user clicks on the UK domain they are redirected to the USA site but would Google frown on that? Hope that makes sense? Thanks
Technical SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Product landing page URL's for e-commerce sites - best practices?
Hi all I have built many e-commerce websites over the years and with each one, I learn something new and apply to the next site and so on. Lets call it continuous review and improvement! I have always structured my URL's to the product landing pages as such: mydomain.com/top-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category/product-name Now this has always worked fine for me but I see more an more of the following happening: mydomain.com/top-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category => mydomain.com/product-name Now I have read many believe that the longer the URL, the less SEO impact it may have and other comments saying it is better to have the just the product URL on the final page and leave out the categories for one reason or another. I could probably spend days looking around the internet for peoples opinions so I thought I would ask on SEOmoz and see what other people tend to use and maybe establish the reasons for your choices? One of the main reasons I include the categories within my final URL to the product is simply to detect if a product name exists in multiple categories on the site - I need to show the correct product to the user. I have built sites which actually have the same product name (created by the author) in multiple areas of the site but they are actually different products, not duplicate content. I therefore cannot see a way around not having the categories in the URL to help detect which product we want to show to the user. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | yousayjump0 -
301 Redirects
Hi, I ran the seomox link report and see that I have an entry for our home page (http://www.trophycentral.com/) and http://www.trophycentral.com/index.html. The index is shown with a 301 redirect. Does this mean that a redirect is already in place to http://www.trophycentral.com/? I want to ensure our traffic is not being split between the two urls, but not sure how to confirm this. Thanks! <colgroup><col width="294"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="81"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="80"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="77"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="214"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards
| URL | HTTP Status | Total Links | Page Authority | Number of Linking Root Domains |
| http://www.trophycentral.com/ | 200 | 5746 | 53 | 244 |
| http://www.trophycentral.com/index.html | 301 | 5123 | 42 | 4 |1 -
Best way to setup large site for multi language
Hello, I am setting up a new site which is going to be very large, over 250,000 products. Most of our customers are in the UK (45%), the rest are from various European countries and the USA. Unfortunately we only have a team of two people writing content for these pages in English. I would value some input on the best way to setup my website structure for ranking. Obviously the best would be individual country oriented domains I.e. domain.fr domain.de domain.co.uk . However we wouldnt have the time to create content for every page and most pages would contain the same content as the English domain. Would I get a penalty for this from google? The second choice is to follow the example of overstock.com and pull in information relating to each country I.e. currency and delivery time. this would be a lot easier but I am concerned that the lack of geo focus would effect my rankings. Does any one have any ideas?
Technical SEO | | DavidLenehan0 -
What is the best way to replace a .co.uk with a .com name
Hi i would like to know about my site which is www.in2town.co.uk which i am currently revamping and i am now in the process of buying a .com name and would like to know the best way to uise it. What i mean is, i have a lot of links going to the www.in2town.co.uk and would like to know should i do a permantent redirect to the .co.uk with the .com or is it possible to have the co.uk replaced with the .com i am trying to work out the best way to do this at the moment as i have never done this before. now after buying the .com for my domain name i would like to know should i use it as a redirect to my main site, or should i develop a sister site and use it. any advice would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860