Old proudct pages - eComm Site

[JustinGeeks]

Hello,

Geeks.com currently has approx. 194k pages in Google index. (approx. 30k suppl.)

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ageeks.com+inurl%3Aadditem&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#sclient=psy&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=Ltp&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial&source=hp&q=site:www.geeks.com%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=876898a2ea0c82c7&biw=1512&bih=641

We have many thousands of old product urls which have gone out of stock, never to "see the light of day" again.  14 years worth!

Should we be 301'ing all old products pages that go out of stock, if we know for certain we will never carry that SKU again?

If we were to do a "mass" 301 of 30k+ urls how would google or other SE's react to that?

Could there be any negative implications to doing so?

What is considered best practice for eComm sites, as I imagine we are not alone with this type of situation.

Thank you in advance.

Michael B.

[AndrewMiller]

Mike,

I agree with Alan that it is a serious issue that warrants some attention and planning. Worst case scenario, the expired pages return a 404 and you're missing a big opportunity to boost the rest of the site. Best case scenario, you 301 or link to category or cross-promotional pages to pass PR and visitors to the next most relevant page/category.

The 301 would accomplish this, but like Alan said you run the risk of inadvertently creating redirect loops if there's no long-term planning for potentially thousands of pages and/or categories.

[AlanBleiweiss]

if we're talking about thousands of pages falling off, yes, to me, that's a high priority.  If you go the 301 route, they should go to the highest page in the chain that product would be associated with that's relevant to the topical intent and relative closeness of match..

So if it's a laser mouse, I wouldn't redirect to the top "desktop computers" or even the "laser mouse" category, but I would 301 it to the mouse optical/trackball category page.

The reason for this is two-fold - it's low enough in the food chain to be highly related, but not so highly related that if the current laser mouse sub-cat disappears altogether that you'd end up in a bad loop of redirects.

That does, then, maintains at least some of the original page authority and boost the parent category.

[JustinGeeks]

Replied above Andrew - thanks again!

[JustinGeeks]

Alan and Andrew - thank you for the thought out replies.

1. How serious of an issue would you consider this in the first place.  Meaning if this were a site you were maintaining would this be high on your list of priorities?

2)  If we just did a simple 301 to the highest category from which the product lived within, would that accomplish what you are saying above Alan?

This product below will be out of stock within the next cpl days.  There is value here as it's garnered a few root domain links ect....

Is it accurate that once product is out of stock and removed from site navigation these pages are no longer crawled and no longer part of the site's architecure, therefore the rest of the site will no longer benefit from the links they have accumulated over time?

Wouldn't we then want to best to preserve the pages authority and 301 it to boost the parent category?

ex: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?InvtId=M261VP-R

Hopefully I am not confusing you too much!   lol

I look forward to your response.

Thank You,

MB

[AlanBleiweiss]

Oh Hey Andrew - great link to Rand's Whiteboard Friday on that.  I hadn't seen that one.  Looks like he covered both our concepts.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Andrew's got one path to consider.  I've got another.  My own most recent example is with a real estate site that has 100,000 property pages that all currently result in a 404 not found.  Yes, that's 100k dead pages.  So I too feel your pain.

What I recommend to clients is to 301 based on category level criteria.  So for example, whatever the highest level category a product had been in - that old page should 301 to the current category page, if one exists.  The 301 should append the new URL with a unique identifier for this situation - something like #NLC  (for no longer carried) - the # sign being the key, because you can then have an anchor at the top of the content area of those pages that if the referrer includes that #NLC in it, visitors would see a box communicating that the product is no longer carried, and inviting them to browse your current inventory in that category.

Doing this would also require having a canonical URL tag on each category page - just to cover the bases.  While anything after the #sign should be ignored as far as causing duplicate content conflicts, it's still best practices to have the canonical URL there in the header.

When no current category exists, then I'd send visitors by 301 to a uniform page (either a product search page or otherwise) yet with the same #NLC string and message.

Of course, getting either Andrew's suggestion or mine implemented will be up to the skills of the programmers doing the implementation.  That's a lot of coding that has to be done accurately and thoroughly tested.

[AndrewMiller]

I've had several large (100k+ pages) clients with similar issues, and despite all the usual "each case is different" disclaimer, I've seen a lot of success with keeping the out of stock items' URLs active, but replacing the content with a message "We're sorry, but this item is out of stock. Might we interest you in product X or content Y?" type of cross-promotion. Depending on your e-commerce platform's ability to dynamically generate different merchandising options, it may be difficult or easy.

You can choose whether or not to keep these pages in your navigation structure if you like, although I'd recommend removing them from your internal search results pages.

That's just my experience, but there's a great discussion thread on this Whiteboard Friday post (which I refer people to all the time): http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-expired-content