How to handle outdated products/pages?
-
Hi,
I wonder how I should handle pages with outdated products. Our market is changing rapidly unfortunately so products we offered in the past are no longer existent.
So for example one of our product was called "PRODUCT 1"
The URL for this product is still:
www.mydomain.com/product-1/with different subpages about the product like:
www.mydomain.com/product-1/about/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/howto/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/pricing/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/whatever/Our new product is totally different from the first one.
Is it still a good idea to set up 301 redirects or are there any other ideas?
Thanks in advance
Bastian -
Hello Bastian,
With regard to outdated products the best solution I have found is to 301 redirect the old product URL to the closest category page. I prefer this to redirecting to another product page because once the new product is outdated you'll be going through multiple redirects.
Look into updating the old blog posts and making them more relevant for readers today. If you are unable to do that I would just leave them where they are. As they get outdated they should drop in the rankings anyway. Or you could 301 redirect them to a more recent post.
-
Hi Kyle,
thanks for your fast answer.
It's really difficult for me where to get started. I have the same problem with old blog posts. Should I keep all the old blog posts even they are not relevant and bad written?
Or is it sometimes a good choice to make a break and build a new website from scratch with just some of the "old" good pages and focus on new relevant content?
Thanks in advance
Bastian -
Hi Bastian,
You're quite fortunate here in that your URL structure is very simple. When product SKUs, item IDs and search parameters enter the mix it can complicate things further. However, given your clean URLs you should be able to 301 redirect without any problems.
The question is where do you 301 that product URL (and its subfolders)? Maybe a new product has superseded it - that might be a good fit; or maybe you can redirect to a category that contains similar products; or if this product has been discontinued and there are no similar products elsewhere on your site, you could 301 back to the homepage.
Of course, you'll want to ensure that your internal linking is also up to scratch and reflects the changes you want to make. Either remove the internal links to that page or send them elsewhere (preferably the former if the product is no longer in stock).
Happy redirecting.
K
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
-
How to stop crawls for product review pages? Volusion site
Hi guys, I have a new Volusion website. the template we are using has its own product review page for EVERY product i sell (1500+) When a customer purchases a product a week later they receive a link back to review the product. This link sends them to my site, but its own individual page strictly for reviewing the product. (As oppose to a page like amazon, where you review the product on the same page as the actual listing.) **This is creating countless "duplicate content" and missing "title" errors. What is the most effective way to block a bot from crawling all these pages? Via robots txt.? a meta tag? ** Here's the catch, i do not have access to every individual review page, so i think it will need to be blocked by a robot txt file? What code will i need to implement? i need to do this on my admin side for the site? Do i also have to do something on the Google analytics side to tell google about the crawl block? Note: the individual URLs for these pages end with: *****.com/ReviewNew.asp?ProductCode=458VB Can i create a block for all url's that end with /ReviewNew.asp etc. etc.? Thanks! Pardon my ignorance. Learning slowly, loving MOZ community 😃 1354bdae458d2cfe44e0a705c4ec38dd
Technical SEO | | Jerrion0 -
Google showing https:// page in search results but directing to http:// page
We're a bit confused as to why Google shows a secure page https:// URL in the results for some of our pages. This includes our homepage. But when you click through it isn't taking you to the https:// page, just the normal unsecured page. This isn't happening for all of our results, most of our deeper content results are not showing as https://. I thought this might have something to do with Google conducting searches behind secure pages now, but this problem doesn't seem to affect other sites and our competitors. Any ideas as to why this is happening and how we get around it?
Technical SEO | | amiraicaew0 -
Website Redesign / Switching CMS / .aspx and .html extensions question
Hello everyone, We're currently preparing a website redesign for one of our important websites. It is our most important website, having good rankings and a lot of visitors from Search Engines, so we want to be really careful with the redesign. Our strategy is to keep as much in place as possible. At first, we are only changing the styling of the website, we will keep the content, the structure, and as much as URLs the same as possible. However, we are switching from a custom build CMS system which created URLs like www.homepage.com/default-en.aspx
Technical SEO | | NielsB
No we would like to keep this URL the same , but our new CMS system does not support this kind of URLs. The same with for instance the URL: www.homepage.com/products.html
We're not able to recreate this URL in our new CMS. What would be the best strategy for SEO? Keep the URLs like this:
www.homepage.com/default-en
www.homepage.com/products Or doesn't it really matter, since Google we view these as completely different URLs? And, what would the impact of this changes in URLs be? Thanks a lot in advance! Best Regards, Jorg1 -
Effect of 302 redirects from empty parent page to sub page
A client's website has links to their service pages which then redirect (302 through a php "Location:" header) to that service's first sub-page. For example, our-services/service-x redirects to our-services/service-x/about-service-x I can only think this has been done because there is no actual content for the parent page and to maintain some kind of structure for navigation and URLs. Really there's no reason why the 'about-service-x' page can't be removed and its content transferred to the main 'service-x' page. Then the redirects can be removed also - it's not how a 302 should be used for a start. I'm just wondering what kind of effect this current redirection has on SEO, as I know 302s don't pass any link juice? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | driftingbass0 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
Duplicate content /index.php/ issues
I'm having some duplicate content issues with Google. I've already got my .htaccess file working just fine as far as I can tell. Rewriting works great, and by using the site you'd never end up on a page with /index.php. However I do notice that on ANY page of the site you could add /index.php and get the same page i.e.: www.mysite.com/category/article and www.mysite.com/index.php/category/article Would both return the same page. How can I 301 or something similar all /index.php pages to the non index.php version? I have no desire for any page on my site to have index.php in it, there is no use to it. Having quite the hard time figuring this out. Again this is basically just for the robots, the URL's the users see are perfect, never had an issue with that. Just SEOMOZ reporting duplicate content and I've verified that to be true.
Technical SEO | | b18turboef1 -
N/A page rank or "grey bar"
I have a web site that is over 10 yrs old, It also has over 30,000 links to it. Last week it received a N/A or "grey bar" page rank. The site also still is listed in the SERPS for my keywords, in fact for a few they have actually improved. The organic traffic is following the same pattern as last year. Webmaster tools doesnt list any critical issues or errors. Is there anything I can do to remedy the situation, or is this just a wait and see? Website is www.netnanny.com.
Technical SEO | | Court_H0 -
I have 15,000 pages. How do I have the Google bot crawl all the pages?
I have 15,000 pages. How do I have the Google bot crawl all the pages? My site is 7 years old. But there are only about 3,500 pages being crawled.
Technical SEO | | Ishimoto0