What to do with non-existing products (removed products)?
-
Hello,
I'm selling unique products - only one of a kind of each product.
This means that whenever a product is sold, it is removed from display.In order not to upset Google by keep removing indexed pages I created a "sold items" page which links to all of the removed products.
The problem is (or maybe it's not a problem) is that I got to the point where I have more "sold items" then existing items (and the list keeps adding up).
What should I do with the non-existing items?
Was I correct?---------------------------------------- ADDED INFO ---------
The way the site is built is that I have main category pages and each of them is showing a large amount of products. Most of these products got indexed by Google. Each product has its own unique URL (Products do not return...)
Once a product is sold it does not come up in the product categories - I only have a general "sold items" in the footer that shows all of them (with a lot of pagination).
Since the products are rapidly changing, i thought it would upset Google to have a hundred 301 redirects in each week or two.
Since the products are very similar to one another (only different measurements / colors etc.), I thought of having a link from a sold Item to a similar available item so if Google will direct someone it will probably be to the available product.
The problem is that the sold items are now 4 times more than the number of available items... I don't think that a store should display 2008's t-shirts on 2012...
Another problem that may rise with so many products is that I'm afraid that the one type of product that is being sold much more often will take charge at the end on the entire site since I will end up with 8,000 sold items of this product, 1000 sold items of other products and 1000 available misc products... this might also start causing duplication problems as the products are quite similar.
Should I stop with the "Sold" products and use 301's?
Thanks
-
Creating 301 to non-existing products is easy (technically speaking) - are you sure that it not considered a bad thing by Google? (pages keep being removed).
Thanks again
-
301 it to the most appropriate substitute. I think it'll be easier to manage your redirect list than to juggle so many pages. You should see the impact in analytics, especially if you are tracking eCom and/or goals. Bounce rates will probably come down and time on page go up. Good luck on this.
-
Dear Chas,
You are actually correct - Google often sends people to the sold items pages and while I assumed that they will look for a similar product - they actually bounce! This is why I thought that if I will add a one way link from a sold Item to an available item Google will direct them to the available item.
About redirection - I can do that but it will be lots of redirections - products are rapidly changing.
Maybe I really should simply remove a product completely when it is sold (make it unreachable from the website - no links to it at all) and have a 301 on it and call it a day... What do you think?
-
True, if the more desirable goal is building page authority rather than selling product. "Sold out" or "out of stock" invites a bounce.
Both could be achieved with a link to a like product from the sold out page, but from a real world eCom standpoint asking product maintenance staff to insert contextual links in product copy is to invite errors or indifference - most platforms have a user friendly redirect mechanism.
-
see update on top. Thanks
-
see update on top. Thanks
-
Hi Chas,
If a product is likely to come back in the future, I'd strong suggest against redirecting the product at-all. Simply leave it to build authority whilst inactive but do display a message saying that it’s not available for purchase.
-
As SEOconsult noted, knowing a little more about the nature of your products would be helpful. I'll make an assumption that these products, while unique, have a relationship or similarity with other products you have. You could judiciously use 301 redirects (or possibly a 302 if you expect the non-existent item to eventually reappear). This is especially important if an item has acquired an external link. Eventual kill the 301 when the SEs have cleansed their index of it.
Situations like this are very common for eCom retailers - 2011 Fall Sweaters are no longer relevant (or available) - but for a good UX you'd want a searcher who found you (your sweaters) through a SERP to be redirected to a similar product (2012 Spring Sweaters).
Having a page of sold items may do you better service as a means of demonstrating credibility to potential customers as a trusted purveyor who has sold many items of XXXXXX. As for upsetting Google by removing indexed pages, quite the contrary - by removing pages and using redirects, you're telling Google come back frequently, this site is dynamic and changes often, therefore it is current and more relevant than a static, unchanging site.
-
Hi there,
Would you be able to give us an example URL (if you don't want to mention the URL in-case this page ranks for the site, perhaps you could link to a pastebin.com page containing a URL)?
Do the individual products have their own URL?
If so, I wouldn't worry about having a page for "sold items", unless of-course that's the only section of the site that mentions the said products.
Without looking at the site, I'd expect there to be categories within the site and within the categories there would be products and each product would have it's own individual page. If that's the case, there should be no need for a page listing "sold items". I'd suggest that the sold items are kept within the category that they're meant for so that they're still linked to internally; perhaps at the bottom so that the active products are at the top and the inactive are at the bottom?
If you could explain how the site works a little further (or provide a URL, I'll be able to give you a more relevant answer).
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
-
Discontinued products on ecommerce store
Hi, I have a high number of very-low/zero traffic and zero backlinked product pages that have been discontinued (and wont come back). For these pages we automatically remove them from our website indexes and also removed internal links and then essentially kept the product pages and their urls intact but just added a note saying "no longer available, how about these..." with alternate similar product options. This seems to be the general consensus online for discontinued product pages that have little value. The questions is do I either 404 or noindex these now discontinued pages? What are the pros or cons? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coma990 -
How to deal with canonicals on dup product pages in Opencart?
So I have a seriously large amount of duplicate content problems on my Opencart site, and I've been trying to figure out the best way to fix them one by one. But is there a common, easy way of doing this? Because frankly, it is a nightmare otherwise. I bought an extension which doesn't appear to work (http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=20468&utm_source=ordercomplete&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wm), so now I'm at a loss.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Mass uploading low quality product pages
Hi Mozzers! I have a question on mass uploading low quality product pages We have a huge catalogue of products and our product managers are looking to mass reference 17,000 new products quickly on the website. Obviously, this will mean content will somehow have to be made unique - which would take a huge amount of resource. Apart from this issue, will adding this many new product pages in one go be bad for SEO? If we also do manage to make the content unique, but not high quality - we'll have 17,000 new low quality product pages - will this reduce our domain authority? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Product Pages not indexed by Google
We built a website for a jewelry company some years ago, and they've recently asked for a meeting and one of the points on the agenda will be why their products pages have not been indexed. Example: http://rocks.ie/details/Infinity-Ring/7170/ I've taken a look but I can't see anything obvious that is stopping pages like the above from being indexed. It has a an 'index, follow all' tag along with a canonical tag. Am I missing something obvious here or is there any clear reason why product pages are not being indexed at all by Google? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Update I was told 'that each of the product pages on the full site have corresponding page on mobile. They are referred to each other via cannonical / alternate tags...could be an angle as to why product pages are not being indexed.'
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobbieD910 -
A/B Testing - Should I add product descriptions on my category landing pages as well as on product pages and if so . how to do this to avoid duplicate content
Hi All, I recently relaunched a new design on my tool hire eCommerce website and now display my products in grid form on my category landing pages as opposed to just a list view which we previously had on the old design. My bounce rates are alot higher than they use to be and my gut instinct is telling me maybe this is wrong . I want to do some a/b testing using a list view. My question is , previously in our list views we just showed the images and pricing and had on page content on the bottom of the page. The user would click on the product image and they would then we taken to the product page which has the product description , t&c, etc etc.. If I was to do this in my a/b testing but change it so we also displayed the product descriptions as well on the category landing pages . Is there a special way to do this as in effect, we would have duplicate content as the product descriptions are also on the product page?. Does anyone have any thoughts on this as to whether its a No No from an SEO point of view ?... Heres a short url link to one of my category pages - http://goo.gl/QJv5gw Historically we use to rank well for the category landing pages and not for the product pages.Our Rankings are down , bounce rates are higher so I am trying to sort both. We have good content on pages etc. Any advice greatly appreciated as always thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Very Slow Recovery after Manual Penalty Removed - Are we missing something?
Our site was handed a manual penalty in November 2013 where exact match anchor text and low quality directory submissions seemed to be the problem. We began the process of link removal, reconfiguration and disavowing. We had already planned to change our domain in early 2014 to coincide with our SSL certificate renewal and although we were hesitant to do this with the manual penalty still there we proceeded and 301'd most of the site but left the pages that were the landing page for most of the exact match links as 302 to the new domain. We continued to work on removing the manual penalty for the old domain as we didn't want it to pass over to the new one and eventually this was removed n March 2014 Now the penalty is gone are we safe to change those 302 redirects to 301 so everything redirects. The problem we have is that six months on, a lot of the pages for the old domain are still indexed and even though we are indexed for the new domains are rankings haven't recovered. Is it just a case of needing to build up a new quality link profile to replace the links that were disregarded or removed when recovering from the penalty or we missing something else
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Removing index.php
I have question for the community and whether or not this is a good or bad idea. I currently have a Joomla site that displays www.domain.com/index.php in all the URLs with the exception of the home page. I have read that it's better to not have index.php showing in the URL at all. Does it really matter if I have index.php in my URL? I've read that it is a bad practice. I am thinking about installing the sh404SEF component on my site and removing the index.php. However, I rank pretty high for the keywords I want in Google, Bing and Yahoo. All of the URLs that show up in the searches have index.php as part of the URL. Has anyone ever used sh404SEF to remove the index.php and how did you overcome not loosing your search engine links? I don't want an existing search showing www.domain.com/index.php/sales and it not linking to the correct page which would now be www.domain.com/sales. I guess I could insert the proper redirects in the htaccess file. But I was hoping to avoid having every page of my site in the htaccess file for redirecting. Any help or advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MedGroupMedia0 -
Sitelink Removal Timeframe
Hi Everyone, Has anyone had experience using the sitelinks demotion tool within GWT after a site redesign? How long does it take for the demotion to go into effect? We just went live with a new version of a site for one of our clients, and the generated sitelinks are no longer valid. I have demoted the urls associated with the old sitelinks, and it's been over a week with no change. Does anyone have experience in a similar situation? Also, for anyone looking for a time frame on changes to a meta description, after resubmitting an updated sitemap, it took 2 days for Google to display an updated meta description. Please advise, Chris Wilson
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_CM0