Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
301 Redirect to product page or category?
-
We manage an ecommerce website that sells health products. A few products have now been discontinued. I’m just wondering what would be the best practice in this case. Should we 301 redirect to a similar product or to a similar category page? ANY HELP IS GREATLY APPRECIATED!
-
agreed - mine was simply my opinion as well
There is no wrong answer.
-
I'd say a product page (if it is very similar to the product that is no longer available). If you have something like "You May Also Like" on the products this would be useful to have. Only my opinion though and there is no right or wrong answer.
-
Sorry about that! I did mean 301 redirect. Thank you!
-
You mean 301, right?
I would say a category page as redirecting to a different product, no matter how similar, could make for a poor user experience.
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
-
Should I redirect or add content, to 47 Pages?
We have an insurance agency website with 47 pages that have duplicate/low content warnings. What's the best way to handle this? I'm I right in thinking I have 2 options? Either add new content or redirect the page? Thanks in advance 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | laurentjb1 -
Can I replace categories with a static page
Hello there. I want to replace all of WordPress categories with static pages so that users see a well designed and constructed presentation of all the articles within each topic instead of just a long list of excerpts. I've already done this with 2 categories and although it is hard work I can't help feeling it is a much better thing for my users. However, I'm concerned that I am embarking on this project without being totally sure that it makes sense from an Seo point of view, or whether there are any downsides I haven't thought of? My idea is that the WordPress categories are set to noindex and nofollow. Search engines should find all of my static category pages and all of the content within each category will be spidered from there instead. Just to be sure you know what I mean here is a link to a normal category - https://www.whitegoodshelp.co.uk/category/consumer/ and here is my static page replacement for it - https://www.whitegoodshelp.co.uk/consumer-rights-appliances/ Both pages contain links to all articles within the category except the one generated by WordPress is just a long paginated list, and my replacement is a proper category page, which is hopefully far more useful . Can someone please confirm that there are no downsides to this strategy? 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | Snowdune1 -
Should I redirect a popular but irrelevant blog post to the home page?
Hi. I'm trying to get my website; www.ciphr.com , to rank for keywords relevant to "HR Software" in the UK. It's a highly competitive industry and we rank ~mid to low on page one for some of our ideal keywords that are highly relevant and high volume. Years ago we took the decision to blog about topics more loosely related to the world of work. One of our blog posts, about plants in the office https://www.ciphr.com/advice/plants-in-the-office/ is popular. It gets decent traffic and consistently builds backlinks to the post without any further effort on our part. The specific page has a PA of 46 and DA of 55 with >500 domains linking to it. This compares to our home page with a PA of 47 and 700 linking domains. It is typically the home page that ranks for our money keywords "HR Software" "HR Systems" in the UK. Because this blog post is so loosely related to our actual business, the traffic it generates is highly unlikely to turn into a customer of ours. I am considering redirecting the blog post to the home page to pass link juice to the home page. The concern I have is that, based on the anchor text and contextual signals from linking pages, Google might then infer that our home page is less relevant for our money keywords and more relevant for "plants". Are my concerns unfounded? What are your thoughts? Should I redirect the blog post to the home page? Another internal page? Keep the blog post live? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | crichardson19922 -
Schema Markup for eCommerce Category Pages?
My research indicates that applying an ItemList schema markup to our category pages is likely the best way to go. However, I've also ready that Google discourages schema markup on category pages. I'm just wondering if any of you have applied schema markup to your category pages and, if so, how did you do it? John,
On-Page Optimization | | JohnBrown75
Essay Writer1 -
Getting the Titles and Headings Right on Product Pages. Userbility vs SEO
Hey Mozzers, I am optimising a chaotic section of the site including many similar products. Writing unique content etc. The titles and urls were all over the place so my first job was to tidy them up so I could make some sense of the situation, especially as sometimes they didn't even match! I should point out were on Magento, so product name = Both the Heading and Title of the page, the meta title can be set separately. When i refer to title I mean both <title>and <h1></strong><br /><br />Before they existed as such<br />URL: domain.com/200-x-0-5-g-rs-232-balance.html<br />TItle: PC-1234 200 x 0.5g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br /><br />This format was (Product Code, Capacities, Resolutions, Accuracy, Product Title)<br /><br />The issue was all 60 products in a page followed this format. Navigating through the page was a nightmare and was just a jumble of numbers and highly confusing even to me who learnt what they all mean, especially when you had 8 products from the same range you got presented with<br /><br />APC-1234 200 x 0.5g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1235 500 x 1g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1236 1000 x 2g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1238 5000 x 10g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1239 10000 x 15g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1210 20000 x 25g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1211 50000 x 50g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance</p> <p>I changed them to something more user friendly.<br /><br />URL: domain.com/200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: 200g Precision Balance<br /><br />This has seen the following benefits<br />- URL is now clear and means something to the user<br />- Product titles are easy to navigate and the page is more pleasing to the eye<br />- The jumble of numbers in the title are now all labelled and shown below each product listing in bullet point so the user can see the basic spec of a product without having to decipher any titles<br /><br />Upon reflection I has a couple of concerns I was hoping you could discuss, I am wondering if I have made the titles too simple.<br />1) I have no product code in the title<br />We have our own products manufactured and sell existing brands with their own product codes. Some of these can be lengthy. Adding them makes them hard to the eye and the page looked cramped.<br /><br />The codes are listed beneath each product title on category pages and on a list on the actual product page, but no where in the titles. <br /><br />2)None of our products have a brand listed in the title<br />None of the products on the site had brand names in anything but the images when i started and as such it snuck under my radar. But should i pre-fix all titles with a brand name?<br /><br />Should </p> <p>URL: domain.com/200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: 200g Precision Balance</p> <p>become</p> <p>URL: domain.com/BRAND1-200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: BRAND1 200g Precision Balance<br /><br />My instinct tells me to change things to include brands as its useful to the customer and should have an SEO benefit, but to leave out product codes as they are accessible to the customer where they are now and dont make things messy and unreadable.<br /><br />As always, thanks for the input!</p></title>
On-Page Optimization | | ATP0 -
NOINDEX, FOLLOW on product page - how about images indexing?
Hi, Since we have a lot of similar products with duplicate descriptions, I decided to NOINDEX, FOLLOW most of these different variants which have duplicate content. However, I guess it would be useful in marketing terms if Google image search still listed the images of the products in image search. How does the image search of Google actually work - does it read the NOINDEX on the product page and therefore skip the image also or is the image search completely dependent on the ALT tag of any image found on our site? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | speedbird12290 -
How to properly remove pages and a category from Google's index
I want to remove this category http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ and all the pages in that category (e.g. http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/7386.html ) from Google's index. I used the following string in the "Reomval URS" section in Google Webmaster Tools: http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/* is that correct or I better use http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ ? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | VinceWicks0 -
Related products - random products or static
Hello, I was curious about where to get related products from. Currently I just grab some random products from the same category. Would there be any benefit to always linking to the same related products on a product page? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | nux0