I have a client whose shop will be down a few days. What would provide less impact to organic search program?
-
I have a client who is moving their warehouse, and their shop will be down for four days. I have been doing some research on the best ways to handle this and I wanted to get the communities feedback on this. One thought is to have the pages live, but people can't place an order - but this does not provide the best customer experience. Another thought is to just do temporary redirects for the shop pages, to land on the "sorry we are moving" page for customers. Another thought was to do 503 HTTP status codes on the pages and then do a temporary redirect to the landing page.
Have any of you experienced this issue? If so, what did you do to minimize the impact to the organic search programs?
NOTE: All of their static content will remain in tact. Only the shop/store will be down.
-
Remembered seeing this back in the day,
Matt Cutts Take,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eYJuT0yGrI&list=UUWf2ZlNsCGDS89VBF_awNvA
I should think you will be fine for just 4 days,
James
-
This is a large consumer brand, so it isn't a handful of people - but let me chat with them about their communication plan. Not sure what they are doing from a customer experience perspective and it would be good to note. Thank you!
So you vote with having the pages live and not order, rather than a redirect... Even for a large consumer brand?
Thanks!
-
Due to the limitations in their system (see my response to Bruce above) I have no say in having inventory or not. But, one of the options is to have all the product pages live and no option to purchase. Possibly putting a banner on the top explaining what is happening... Maybe that is a better option the the temporary redirects... I just don't know.
-
Sure! It is a large brand that has a warehouse system and inventory system hooked into its website. By moving the warehouse, they must take the shop offline. That is just a fact I have to deal with. It is not a decision I can make or can influence. But, I can influence how it is taken offline.
I can't agree more on the "give us a few extra days" solution, but their inventory system (which is hooked into its website) can't do it. Otherwise they lose their data. I don't get it, but that is the way it is...
Thanks!
-
I would personally vote for having the pages live and either not being able to place an order (with a message), or have them be able to place an order but have a message saying things will be delayed. Totally depending on your client's type of business and customers, they could also do an email or blog post or note on their home page warning people in advance of the downtime.
My husband runs a small business, and many things are custom-manufactured by us. It's a small, niche industry, and many of the people know each other. There are only a handful of forums devoted to the hobby. We had a period where we were effectively shut down for a couple of months, due to a fire at the location we were using, followed by moving. We did a blog post on our site, and then posted on all the forums letting people know what was up and that orders would be delayed. I did take the shopping cart icons off the site at that point so that people couldn't order. Thankfully, people were fairly understanding.
-
We have moved our place of business a couple of times. Big job. Everyone has also been out of the office for a conference.
Method 1) Move on Friday and have it done by Monday... maybe you can pick a three day weekend. Have a big sale on your bulky items for a couple weeks before the move. GET SOME SHELVES EMPTY. Place restocking order with supplier so that it arrives at your new location early in the week after your move.
Start moving all nonessential items on Thursday, anything that you can get out of there. Leave only what pack-and-ship people need to operate on Friday at the old location. Get minimal furniture and computers in the new location and operating on Thursday. Get empty inventory shelving at the new location ready to accept inventory. Take anything to the new location that you can.
On Friday, pack-and-ship people arrive early and get all orders picked and packed and shipped. As soon as pack-and-ship people are finished the moving team yanks their furniture and supplies and takes it to new location.Pack inventory in boxes and move shelving to new location before inventory. LABEL THE BOXES WITH SHELF NUMBERS.
Friday night, Saturday and Sunday moving team gets all shelving, inventory, and pack-and-ship supplies and furniture set up at new location. Pack-and-ship people work during the weekend to get the inventory back on the shelves as they want it. Don't let the moving crew do this or pack-and-ship people will be cussing.
Monday morning, pack-and-ship people are ready to go, starting a little early so they have extra time to be ready for your package pickup people. Pay overtime and a nice bonus for everyone's hard work.
- Method 2)... place a big face-slapping sign on every page of your site and even bigger in the checkout. "We are moving to a new location. Please feel free to shop but know that orders will not ship until (fill in date)."
-
I would agree with Bruce in that unless this is a "must have tomorrow" industry, it might be best to leave everything as is and add something that tells your customers that you're down for a few days. Why not throw up a banner on every product page that says something like "we're moving to serve you better - so orders may be delayed for a few days more than normal". We did something similar when we moved and most customers understood.
Good Luck
Ken
-
Not sure of all the facts so very hard to make a call on what to do.
Initial thoughts:- Why is moving warehouse stopping ordering? If this is because you cannot ship fast enough, extend your lead time to ship to cover these days.
To recreate an old phrase of "Out of stock is out of business" to "Offline is out of business"....if a customer makes the effort to get to the site and then cannot buy, what is stopping this and is the reason really really valid. Can you give a few more details about what why and how come?
Warmest regards
Bruce
-
Yes, I read that one. Figured it was a few years old and maybe there was another solution available.
Thanks!
-
Here's a blog post from a couple of years ago that talks about that and should be helpful in your situation. http://moz.com/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance
Best of luck!
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
-
Increase in pages crawled per day
What does it mean when GWT abruptly jump from 15k to 30k pages crawled per day? I am used to see spikes, like 10k average and a couple of time per month 50k pages crawled. But in this case 10 days ago moved from 15k to 30k per day and it's staying there. I know it's a good sign, the crawler is crawling more pages per day, so it's picking up changes more often, but I have no idea of why is doing it, what good signals usually drive google crawler to choose to increase the number of pages crawled per day? Anyone knows?
Technical SEO | | max.favilli1 -
Better to have less pages with more related content?
I work with a law firm and we are having a hard time busting into the first page of results for any of our keywords. I am new at SEO and have been trying to analyze how are competitors have an edge over us when on paper we are better optimized than their websites. One glaring difference is they have fewer webpages, which possibly makes each of their pages more keyword rich. Would it be smarter to condense our many webpages/topics into less, more general web pages? I hope my question is even making sense, thanks for any possible help! Our site is http://www.utahdefenseattorney.net/
Technical SEO | | MyOwnSEO0 -
Sitel inks suddenly vanished in google search
Hello, My site is designzzz.com if you will search in google the term : designzzz it use to return sitelinks below , but now it isn't, what could be the reason ? cheers
Technical SEO | | wickedsunny10 -
Duplicate content vs. less content
Hi, I run a site that is currently doing very well in google for the terms that we want. We are 1,2 or 3 for our 4 targeted terms, but havent been able to jump to number one in two categories that I would really like to. In looking at our site, I didn't realize we have a TON of duplicate content as seen by SEO moz and I guess google. It appears to be coming from our forum, we use drupal. RIght now we have over 4500 pages of duplicate content. Here is my question: How much is this hurting us as we are ranking high. Is it better to kill the forum (which is more community service than business) and have a very tight site SEO-wise, or leave the forum even with the duplicate content. Thanks for your help. Erik
Technical SEO | | SurfingNosara0 -
Increase Search Ranking for CEO
Hi guys My company CEO is concerned that when her name is googled pictures of a glamour model appear in the image results area. The glamour model shares a second name with our CEO and this is why the model's images are appearing. I have been asked to rectify this situation. My CEO has a linked in page and twitter account which are underused but no personal page on our company website. I was thinking of buying the url for the CEO's name and optimizing a small site for her name with bio etc and links to twitter, lined in etc. Would this be the best strategy? Thanks Gavin
Technical SEO | | gavinr0 -
The impact of mulstisite wordpress on seo
hi there, i would talk about a specific topic: The impact of mulstisite wordpress on seo Do you think that penalize seo activity ? i make you an example : a wordpress network of sites, domain based let the possibility to manage two domain on a single wp install, but even if the domains are separete, how does google see them, as separate or as a sigle domain?
Technical SEO | | guidoboem0 -
Recent Webmaster Tools Glitch Impacting Site Quality?
The ramifications of this would not be specific to myself but to anyone with this type of content on their pages... Maybe someone can chime in here, but I'm not sure how much if at all site errors (for example 404 errors) as reported by Google Webmaster Tools are seen as a factor in site quality, which would impact SEO rankings. Any insight on that alone would be appreciated. I've noticed some fairly new weird stuff going on in the WMT 404 error reports. It seems as though their engine is finding objects within the source code of the page that are NOT links but look a URL, then trying to crawl them and reporting them as broken. I've seen a couple different of cases in my environment that seem to trigger this issue. The easiest one to explain are Google Analytic virtual pageview Javascript calls where for example you might send a virtual pageview back to GA for clicks on outbound links. So in the source code of your page you would have something like: onclick="<a class="attribute-value">_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outboundclick/www.othersite.com']);</a> Although this is obviously not a crawl-able link, sure enough Webmaster Tools now would be reporting the following broken page with a 404: www.mysite.com/outboundclick/www.otherwite.com I've seen other such cases of thing that look like URLs but not actual links being pulled out of the page source and reported as broken links. Has anyone else noticed this? Do 404 instances (in this case false ones) reported by Webmaster Tools impact site quality rankings and SEO? Interesting issue here, I'm looking forward to hear some people's thoughts on this. Chris
Technical SEO | | cbubinas0 -
Google Search Parameters
Couple quick questions. Is using the parameter pws=0 still useful for turning off personalization? Is there a way to set my location as a URL parameter as well? For instance, I want to set my location to United States, can this be done with a URL param the same way as pws=0?
Technical SEO | | nbyloff0