ECommerce: Best Practice for expired product pages

[zeepartner]

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?

[KevinBudzynski]

Unfortunately manually.

[Matthew_Edgar]

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!

[Igal_Zeifman]

Good luck

[zeepartner]

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:)

[Igal_Zeifman]

(+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.

[Matthew_Edgar]

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

[zeepartner]

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.

[KevinBudzynski]

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.