Categories which are frequently empty
-
We have a medium traffic site (www.boatshed.com) which sells used boats, the site does fairly well for popular search phrases, often ranking on first page.
A common way for people to search is by boat manufacturer, for example "sunseeker for sale" or "sunseeker 33 for sale".
To service those searches, we have search results page with URL's like: "/used-boats-for-sale/sunseeker" and "/used-boats-for-sale/sunseeker/33" (i.e. make and model).
This is fine for common makes but we have a lot of makes where we might have just one which, when sold, then leaves the page with no boats to show. It could then be just weeks till we get another one or sometimes years.
Once a manufacturer has no boats for sale, we automatically remove the link to that page from the site and from the sitemap. These pages are now being flagged as soft 404s in Webmaster tools.
Currently these pages still work and just show a "No results found" message.
I am unsure of how to deal with these pages.
Options as I see them:
-
Add a "no-index, follow" tag to the pages and continue to remove them from the sitemap. My concern is that when we do get a new boat for sale, the page will not rank again or take a long time to be re-indexed.
-
Add value to the 'no results found' page - for example, show listings for similar boats. If I do this (which makes sense from a usability perspective), would it be acceptable to leave these pages with an "index" tag?
-
404 them - my concern being this basically says "this page has been permanently removed" when actually it will probably have content again soon.
-
301 redirect to a page of similar boats with a message that we don't have any of that specific type at the moment.
-
-
Hi, thank you very much for your input. I think Linda meant that adding "something about how each alternate choice is similar to/different from the original boat" would be labour intensive (which is correct for 2k makes and 8m models!) but we already have logic to get "similar boats" so we'll be able to auto populate these pages with some content.
-
I have to agree with Linda: Option 2 is your best option by far. Not only do you not continually have to manage, maintain, and remove/add these pages all the time, but they'll retain their link-juice and SEO properties.
However, I would disagree that this would require a lot of work as far as coding is concerned - even if there are thousands of pages. All you need to do is have each search page set to show set groups/images/products when results=0. Depending on how your site is coded, it could be very simple, or at least fairly easy to do.
-
Hi there,
I often am faced with a similar issue on my site, apelectric.com. We have models that get discontinued and replaced all the time. We also have obsolete parts and out of stock inventory every so often. I think that your plan has solid strategy. The pages that still have value because they are old and have seen a good amount of traffic can be either repurposed or redirected to better suit your website. If you are ranking well on pages, don't get rid of them. Matt Cutts at Google has backed the 404 strategy when a product is completely discontinued with no hopes of returning. In this case, I don't think that is the best strategy.
What I have done in the past is re-purposed the page to offer similar products. This is great for the user, and in turn, great for your SEO. Having pages with nothing on them is never a good idea, so add relevant items like similar models or any kind of parts and maintenance if you provide those. You can also add some content about the product you don't have anymore to go with the similar products. Content is a great idea all the time.
I hope this helps!
-
I like option 2. You could put up some information about the searched-for boat and then follow up by saying that there are none available at this time but here are some similar boats, and add your links to those boats.
You could even add something about how each alternate choice is similar to/different from the original boat, if that is something that time allows. This would be useful to the searcher and keep your pages indexed. (Of course, this depends on how many pages we are talking about--it would be labor-intensive for thousands of pages...)
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
-
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chelseaskirtinguk0 -
Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages
Hello Fellow Moz's, We have an issue redirecting some /TAG and /Category pages to inner pages. As an example we use: RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category(.*) https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page//$1 That works well. The issue is we have other categories and tags that are named similar to /Sample-Category As an example, if we try to redirect /Sample-Category-1 to /New-Page-1 - it will not work, and redirects to /New-Page I assume this is because /Sample-Category is already being redirected, so anything after /Sample-Category like -1 or -2 or -3 etc, will not be recognized. Anyone know of a workaround?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jes-Extender-Australia0 -
Ecommerce: A product in multiple categories with a canonical to create a ‘cluster’ in one primary category Vs. a single listing at root level with dynamic breadcrumb.
OK – bear with me on this… I am working on some pretty large ecommerce websites (50,000 + products) where it is appropriate for some individual products to be placed within multiple categories / sub-categories. For example, a Red Polo T-shirt could be placed within: Men’s > T-shirts >
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AbsoluteDesign
Men’s > T-shirts > Red T-shirts
Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts
Men’s > Sale > T-shirts
Etc. We’re getting great organic results for our general T-shirt page (for example) by clustering creative content within its structure – Top 10 tips on wearing a t-shirt (obviously not, but you get the idea). My instinct tells me to replicate this with products too. So, of all the location mentioned above, make sure all polo shirts (no matter what colour) have a canonical set within Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts. The presumption is that this will help build the authority of the Polo T-shirts page – this obviously presumes “Polo Shirts” get more search volume than “Red T-shirts”. My presumption why this is the best option is because it is very difficult to manage, particularly with a large inventory. And, from experience, taking the time and being meticulous when it comes to SEO is the only way to achieve success. From an administration point of view, it is a lot easier to have all product URLs at the root level and develop a dynamic breadcrumb trail – so all roads can lead to that one instance of the product. There's No need for canonicals; no need for ecommerce managers to remember which primary category to assign product types to; keeping everything at root level also means there no reason to worry about redirects if product move from sub-category to sub-category etc. What do you think is the best approach? Do 1000s of canonicals and redirect look ‘messy’ to a search engine overtime? Any thoughts and insights greatly received.0 -
Ranking for homepage & category page?
We lost our Google organic ranking (position 1 - 3) for our highest converting key phrase (cotton tees) in February. The ranking was for our homepage (brandname.com) which is very image heavy and doesn't have much readable content. We noticed that all of our competitors are ranking above us for their category page, not their homepage. The difference between us and our competitors is that we specialize in this key phrase and they just offer one category of the key phrase. For example, we only sell cotton tee's and they sell cotton tees, handbags and shoes. When we dropped we noticed that Google began showing our homepage AND category page in the results, so we pointed our brandname.com to brandname.com/cotton-tees canonically. The idea was that this would assure that the homepage and category page were not competing with each other. The homepage was not really optimized for cotton tees so we thought this might help. 1. Is there any harm in removing the canonical and allowing both pages to rank? (We're also working on redesigning the homepage to add more readable text & optimize for cotton tees.) 2. Our homepage URL used to be "brandname.com/cotton-tees" and we consistenly ranked between 1 and 3 for cotton tees during that time. We modified the homepage URL because it seemed spammy and are now just "brandname.com". Does it make sense to go back to the URL with the key phrase in it if that is our main product and we want to rank for it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
Category 404 Error in Wordpress | Help!!!
Hello Gurus hope everyone is having a fantastic day. Right so I've been pulling my hair with this 404 error on links as such: htttp://manvanlondon.co.uk/category/clients/removals/man-and-van-wandsworth This link appears in the category page clients and the /removals/man-and-van-wandsworth part is the link that should take the user on the Man and Van Wandsworth page in the/ from the footer. However this link and all other links in the footer on these category pages/posts appear to be broken ONLY on this category pages, thus creating 404 errors. And those pages(i.e man and van Wandsworth) are not even categorized. The website is www.manvanlondon.co.uk . We tried various things on Wordpress and nothing is working including non-indexing. Has anyone met this problem before? Is there a way to fix it? Thank you for your time, and hope my explanations make sens. Monica
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monicapopa0 -
"Category" word in URLs of blog is it SEO Friendly URL ??
Hello respected community members, I saw many times that "Category" word comes in URL of blog. So my que is that is this negative for SEO or Positive. & if we don't wanna to come CATEGORY in URL how can we remove while URL Optimization ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sourabhrana390 -
What Makes Good Content for Category Pages
Hello, We're putting (roughly, depending on the category) 500 words under the products or categories under category pages. We're having a writer do these who has to learn the products from scratch. With over 100 categories, it's not possible for the client to write 500 words for each one. We're wondering, 1. What should go into a category description? 2. How do you prep a writer to write these, and is it possible to do so and get good content? I'm afraid that we're writing just words for long tails, and I know on the product pages, home page, and articles that it has to be the best content, probably written by the client himself if he is knowledgable enough. Open to your suggestions on what should be in these, how long they should be, and who should write them.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Easy way to change wordpress category titles. Currently categories are appearing with the same title?!
I'm working on a wordpress adult dating review site and have started to set up categories for each of my main keywords. I have also started to add sub categories by county and town and so far have done so for the counties of 'Lincolnshire' and 'Derbyshire'. The problem is though that for each of my subcategories the page titles are appearing the same. For example: www.mysite.com/category/online-dating/lincolnshire/spalding (root category online dating) shows the title as 'Spalding'. www.mysite.com/category/adult-dating/lincolnshire/spalding also has the title 'Spalding' even though it's root category is different (adult dating). It's probably easier to go to http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com to see how it's set up. If you click in the category text in the top menu and navigate to dating/derbyshire/alfreton for example and then adult dating/derbyshire/alfreton you'll notice the page titles are the same. I use all in one SEO pack and have rewrite titles checked with category titles set to %category_title% | %blog_title%. I also use category SEO updater. In order to prevent duplicate content issues how can I simply make the title of each category category root title/category subtitle(county)/category subtitle 2(town). The title of each category page would then read for example Online Dating Lincolnshire Spalding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0