ECommerce: Best Practice for expired product pages
-
I'm optimizing a pet supplies site (http://www.qualipet.ch/) and have a question about the best practice for expired product pages.
We have thousands of products and hundreds of our offers just exist for a few months. Currently, when a product is no longer available, the site just returns a 404. Now I'm wondering what a better solution could be:
1. When a product disappears, a 301 redirect is established to the category page it in (i.e. leash would redirect to dog accessories).
2. After a product disappers, a customized 404 page appears, listing similar products (but the server returns a 404)
I prefer solution 1, but am afraid that having hundreds of new redirects each month might look strange. But then again, returning lots of 404s to search engines is also not the best option.
Do you know the best practice for large ecommerce sites where they have hundreds or even thousands of products that appear/disappear on a frequent basis? What should be done with those obsolete URLs?
-
Unfortunately manually.
-
Yep, on two different sites we did thousands of redirects at a time with no issues. In one case it was annual and the other it was quarterly but I don't see any reason monthly would be any different.
Definitely post your findings after implementation or maybe even write a YouMoz post about what you find out!
-
Good luck
-
Thanks for your thoughts guys.
@Igal@Incapsula: I like your 302 idea! That might acutally make a lot of sense for some products that are short-lived.
@Matthew: Good to know that lots of 301s were not an issue on your sites. Are you talking about thousands of those, though?
Most importantly, I will have to find something that can be automated and doesn't require much extra-work. I will probably go for 301s and remove those after a few months
Remind me to post my learnings here after implementation:)
-
(+1) For redirect to main category page option. I did this several time, including for a very large tourism site which had a LOT of "inventory" changes (we are talking about dozens-hundreds/day) and had great results.
One thing I would like to suggest is to look into doing 302 and removing the redirects after 2-3 month.
The reason for this is purely practical. In our case, after just a few month, we were looking at many thousands of redirects and this is not something you want to "carry around".
My suggestion allows you to still make use of link juice for removed pages and, at the same time, have a manageable redirect profile.As a safe net you can have a generic: "404 >>> 301 >>> Homepage" rule underneath.
-
Hey,
In general, I would opt for option 1 as that would be the most scale-able solution. Whenever I've done this, I've not seen any issues with having lots of 301s appear. Given the shorter life span of those product pages you probably won't have lots of links going to those pages (or social, etc.) and I think that helps explain why I've not seen issues redirecting this many pages.
That being said, if you do have lots of links or social signals referencing a certain product page, that is when I'd opt for the custom page listing similar products. I've had success doing this for high-traffic product pages that have been removed as it can help maintain the sale. In terms of the signal, it really depends. If you are still offering unique content relevant to search queries and links referencing that page, I'd deliver a status 200 (it is still a good page worthy of attention). If the content isn't all that unique, and it is more for people (to maintain the sale) as opposed to search, I would have that page deliver a status 410 (saying it is gone).
I hope that helps!
Matthew
-
thanks Kevin, so you're also going with option 1.
Do you make those redirects manually, or does it run automated?
I should add that it's a Magento Webshop and we definitely need some automation since I am talking about hundreds of product pages.
-
We have a customize search page for each category. When a product has been discontinued, we do a 301 redirect those pages to the category search page.
We use to do a 301 redirect of list similar products (by doing a search and capturing the url with the search term), but it proved to be to time-consuming as these products did not traditionally sold that well and did not bring in much traffic.
Not saying it's the best way, but this is what we do.
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 is best practice for fixing urls that have duplicate content, non-static and other issues?
Hi, I know there are several good answers regarding duplicate content issues on this website already, however I have a question that involves the best way to avoid negative SEO impacts if I change the urls for an ecommerce site. Basically a new client has the following website http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk and I notice that it suffers from duplicate content due to the http://www version and the non www version of the pages - this seems quite easy to fix using the guidance on this website. However I notice that the product page urls are far from ideal in that they have several issues including:- (a) they are mostly too long (b) don't include the keyword terms (in terms of best practice) (c) they don't use Static URLS An example of one these product urls would be http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk/plant-details.php?name=Autumn Glory&p_genus=Hebe&code=heagl&category=hebe I'd like to address these issues, but the pages rank highly for the products themselves, therefore my question is what would you recommend I do to fix the urls without risking the high positions that many of these product pages have? thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | bendyman0 -
Titling Category Pages Like You Would a Blog Page?
So, with our 600 or so category pages, I was curious... on each of these category pages we show the top 12 products for that category. In trying to increase click through rate, I wonder if it would be prudent to use some of the strategies I see used for Blog posts with thee category pages. i.e. Instead of Category Name - Website Name How about: Top 12 Kitty Litters We Carry - View the Best and the Rest! Or something like that. And then in the description, I could put, "Number 8 made my jaw drop!!!" (Ok, kidding about that one...) But serious about the initial question... Thanks! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Why are only a few of our pages being indexed
Recently rebuilt a site for an auctioneers, however it has a problem in that none of the lots and auctions are being indexed by Google on the new site, only the pages like About, FAQ, home, contact. Checking WMT shows that Google has crawled all the pages, and I've done a "Fetch as Google" on them and it loads up fine, so there's no crawling issues that is standing out. I've set the "URL Parameters" to no effect too. Also built a sitemap with all the lots in, pushed to Google which then crawled them all (massive spike in Crawl rate for a couple days), and still just indexing a handful of pages. Any clues to look into would be greatly appreciated. https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/auctions/
Technical SEO | | Blue-shark0 -
Best practice when reducing the number of pages
Hi guys, I have recently changed one of our sites pages from having 1 main department page that links off to 6 others to showing all the products on one long page in an effort to have one authoritative page for this product type that can then be promoted on its own rather than promoting 7 pages and thus watering down any value. My question is now I have removed the links to the old pages should I just delete these pages altogether and setup redirects or should I leave them up as individual landing pages for those smaller product groups? If you look at the page below you can still access the smaller pages from the links in the jquery banner. http://www.orderblinds.co.uk/dept/wooden-venetian-blinds_d0161.htm Thank you in advance, Matt
Technical SEO | | OrderBlinds0 -
Crawl Test Report only shows home page and no inner site pages?
Hi, My site is [removed] When I first tried to set up a new campaign for the site, I received the error: Roger has detected a problem: We have detected that the root domain [removed] does not respond to web requests. Using this domain, we will be unable to crawl your site or present accurate SERP information. I then ran a Crawl Test per the FAQ. The SEOmoz crawl report only shows my home page URL and does not have any inner site pages. This is a Joomla site. What is the problem? Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | crave810 -
Ecommerce website with too many links on page
Hi, I'm working on onsite seo for an ecommerce website and my recent report has shown that I have a high number of pages where there are 'too many links on page'. Does anyone have tips on how to avoid this when we're using mega menus, plenty of navigation for the user and links to products on each page? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Will_Craig1 -
New EMD update effected my mom's legit author page? From page 1 in SERP to nowhere for her name
I think my mom's site, MargaretTerry.com was hit by this update for her name "Margaret Terry". Went from bouncing around the first page on google.com and .ca all the time to nowhere on the index. The results are now very strange, a mix of Youtube, linked in, and small book stores that she has done events at recently to promote her first book. I was checking after some of my SEO buddys were freaking out about their EMD's getting hit on Sunday. She is an aspiring author with a book coming out this month. There is obviously no ads or spam content on the site... I have never done SEO for it either except a bit of on page I guess. It sucks that people might be grabbing her book soon and when they Google her name nothing shows up. This couldn't have really happened at a worse time. Not to mention the hours spent building the site to her liking, free of charge of course 🙂 Is there anyone I can contact there to help me out? Shouldn't and EMD that is someones name still rank when you search their name?
Technical SEO | | Operatic0 -
Snagged an Expired Domain Best way to get all the Link Juce?
Found a PR4 domain that had expired and not been renewed. Best way to get all the link juice from it? just 301 the whole thing to MY main domain?
Technical SEO | | bozzie3110