Todo steps when you switch products offline.
-
Dear SEOMoz community,
By means of this message I hope someone can clear this up for me.
Let's say you have a web shop and sometimes you have to put a product offline, because they are not in production anymore.
Could anyone tell me they activities that you have to undertook when you switch products to offline? Think about the redirection of URL, etc.
Preferably a specific answer will be most appreciated :).
Thanks in advance,
Martin
-
The process we use with several clients follows this flow
is the product out of stock temporarily?
-Yes, leave page up but remove from category pagesis product out of stock permenantly?
-Yes, redirect to category page and remove category page links (if not done automatically). -
That should do it. Nothing else really to consider as long as the page no longer has internal links going to it.
On a side note, ensure that the redirect is relevant. For example, if you were a visitor to a website and thought you were looking for a torch, you wouldn't be happy if you were redirected to a bird cage. This would usually just result in them leaving your site and would probably have an adverse effect on your site's performance as drop rates would increase.
If something really cannot be redirected to another similar page then redirecting to the homepage is your best bet.
-
Thanks for your quick responce, I appreciate.
Is that everything what I should do? Or are there other aspects I have to consider?
We are redirecting them like u said.
Best regards,
Martin
-
I'm assuming by taking them offline you mean discontinuing the product permanently? If so, it is important that you 301 redirect (always 301 redirect unless the product is coming back at some point) the page to the nearest closest product or if there is nothing similar that you sell, redirecting it back to the closest category page.
Hope this helps a little?
Matt
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
-
Product Subdomain Outranking "Marketing" Domains
Hello, Moz community! I have been puzzling about what to do for a client. Here is the challenge. The client's "product"/welcome page lives at www.client.com this page allows the visitor to select the country/informational site they want OR to login to their subdomain/install of the product. Google is choosing this www.client.com url as the main result for client brand searches. In a perfect world, for searchers in the US, we would get served the client's US version of the information/marketing site which lives at https://client.com/us, and so on for other country level content (also living in a directory for that country) It's a brand new client, we've done geo-targeting within the search console, and I'm kind of scared to rock the boat by de-indexing this www.client.com welcome screen. Any thoughts, ideas, potential solutions are so appreciated. THANKS! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | SimpleSearch0 -
Landing pages showing up as HTTPS when we haven't made the switch
Hi Moz Community, Recently our tech team has been taking steps to switch our site from http to https. The tech team has looked at all SEO redirect requirements and we're confident about this switch, we're not planning to roll anything out until a month from now. However, I recently noticed a few https versions of our landing pages showing up in search. We haven't pushed any changes out to production yet so this shouldn't be happening. Not all of the landing pages are https, only a select few and I can't see a pattern. This is messing up our GA and Search Console tracking since we haven't fully set up https tracking yet because we were not expecting some of these pages to change. HTTPS has always been supported on our site but never indexed so it's never shown up in the search results. I looked at our current site and it looks like landing page canonicals are already pointing to their https version, this may be the problem. Anyone have any other ideas?
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Will Switching to HTTPS Lower My Domain Authority?
Hi All, I had a quick look online but couldn't find any information regarding this so thought I would ask. Please point me in the right direction if it has been asked before of if there are any useful articles online. We are currently in the process of switching one of our clients old sites from http to https, we have done all of the steps except from making the https version the main domain, or 301ing the http version to the https version. If we were to do this would we expect to see a drop in domain authority? a drop in keyword rankings? or is there anything else we should be worried about? Thanks Mozzers
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
How big is the problem: 404-errors as result of out of stock products?
We had a discussion about the importance of 404-errors as result of products which are out of stock. Of course this is not good, but what is the leverance in terms of importance: low-medium-high?
Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG0 -
NOINDEX,FOLLOW on product pages
Hi Can I have people's thoughts on something please. We sell wedding stationery and whilst we can generate lots of good content describing a particular range of stationery we can't relistically differentiate at a product level. So imagine we have three ranges Range 1 - A Bird Range 2 - A Heart Range 3 - A Flower Within each of these ranges we would have invitations, menus, place cards, magnets etc. The ranges vary quite alot so we can write good textual keyword rich descriptions that attract traffic (i.e. one about the bird, one about the heart and one about the flower). However the individual products within a range just reflect the design for the range as a whole (as all items in a range match). Therefore we can't just copy the content down to the product level and if we just describe the generic attributes of the products they will alll be very similar. We have over 1,000 "products" easily so I am conscious of creating too much duplication over the site in case Mr Panda comes to call. So I was thinking that I "might" NOINDEX, FOLLOW the product pages to avoid this duplication and put lots of effort into making my category pages much better and content rich. The site would be smaller in the index BUT I do not really expect to generate traffic from the product pages because they are not branded items and any searches looking for particular features of our stationery would be picked up, much more effectively, by the category pages. Any thoughts on this one? Gary
Technical SEO | | gtrotter6660 -
Additional product information: the product's sales page or a blog post?
I want to go in-depth about different customizations for custom caps, which is one of the products we offer. I just don't know whether it would be better--from an SEO perspective--to expand the caps sales page we already have or to write a blog post to give the site another valuable indexed page. From a user standpoint, I don't think it's as important, because if I do it the blog way, I can't just put a link on the page saying, Want more customizations? Visit our blog post. Any opinions?
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept1 -
Minimum text per product page
I have an ecommerce site with thousands of product pages. I am using the product details provided by the manufacturer (as with most other sites selling the same products). I have 3 questions: If I want to set my pages apart with product descriptions, what it s the minimum amount of text I can add to make them unique? The content will be from an offshore company, so it will likely not be of the best quality. Can Google determine the quality of text and evaluate it differently? I have also added product reviews to the site. Are there any other methods to make the product pages more unique or SEO friendly?
Technical SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
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?
Technical SEO | | CC_Dallas0