Is it better to find a page without the desired content, or not find the page?
-
Are there any studies that show which is best? If you find my page but not the specific thing you want on it, you may still find something of value. But, if you don't you may associate my site with poor results, which can be worse than finding what you want at a competitor site. IOW maybe it is best to have pages that ONLY and ALWAYS have the content desired.
What do the studies suggest?
I'm asking because I have content that maybe 1/3 of the time exists and 2/3 of the time doesn't...think 'out of stock' products. So, I'm wondering if I should look into removing the page from being indexed during the 2/3 or should keep it. If I remove it then my concern is whether I lose the history/age factor that I've read Google finds important for credibility. Your thoughts?
-
No problem, glad I could help!
-
Great answer Monica -- thank you!
-
I can't think of a study off of the top of my head that could help you. What I can tell you is that if you are directing traffic to a page on your site, the content should be relevant to the search term. For example, you don't want to have a page for blue widgets attracting traffic for pink teddy bears. This will create an awful user experience, high bounce rate and decrease in traffic over time. As the engines see your page as less and less relevant and that it provides a bad user experience you will start to lose rankings.
However, there are exceptions to that logic. For example, I have a page on my site that is the landing page for a very popular product. The manufacturer discontinued the product and I didn't want to give up the value of the page, so I left the relevant content, added the discontinued text and then offered replacement models closer to the top of the page. If anyone happened to land on that page, I wouldn't lose the traffic, but instead give them relevant options. If I had changed the status to 404 or 410, then there would be no possibility of capturing or converting the traffic. Here is a page: http://www.apelectric.com/6241-Generac-Guardian-Series-14kW-p/6241.htm
I have also talked to lots of people who have websites with pages for events, community activities, concert pages and things of that nature. After the shows or events, the page doesn't necessarily have "purpose". The page can be used to aggregate reviews of bands or performers, community fairs. It can be used as a community forum, or it can simply be updated to offer upcoming schedules.
As far as out of stock products go, I wouldn't 404 or take down a page with an "out of stock" product. I don't know what platform you use, but Big Commerce gives me the option to add a "Pre-Order" button to a product when it goes out of stock. It would be optimal if your customers could still order a product if it is coming back into stock in the future. I would add a message near the add to cart button saying the item is temporarily out of stock, but you can order for shipment in the next 2-3 weeks, or however long the window of time is. The more information you give your searcher the more opportunity you are creating for engagement and conversions. 404ing the pages is not the answer to a short term inventory shortage. When you 404 or 410 a page you are running the risk of losing your ranking on that page, so when you enable the page again you will have to start ranking again. It could take time depending on the competition of the product.
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
-
Google not giving ranking to the intended page of my website.
Hello friends, This is my very first question, I hope I will explain my issue correctly. I have created two pages related to SSC CGL keyword on my website: https://www.ibtindia.com/ssc-cgl-notification-exam-date 2) https://www.ibtindia.com/ssc-cgl-apply-online I want to target the keyword SSC CGL Apply Online on the 2nd URL but Google is only considering the 1st page for all the "apply" related keywords as well. Can anyone suggest to me how to get the second page in rankings for its intended keywords? I will be very thankful for this help. I tried adding image but its showing dummy. Please you can check it op GOOGLE SERP Second page
Search Behavior | | namitathakur0 -
Google smacked my site and dropped all rankings, can't find out why
I have checked out everything, I mean everything. We have no dupe content, our content is a little thin, but it is ours and accurate enough to help our customers.We follow all SEO guidelines and make sure we de-index any pages with no / little content (like privacy, or faq) All in all, we haven't done any major updates to the sites, and everything was great (page one on almost all kw) but beginning of the month, all kw wiped to the second page, than third, than back to one and now pretty much gone (rank 100-200) I really don't know what to do. We didn't receive a manual action, and the last algo update was nothing big to cause such a drastic change. Meanwhile our competition (multiple sites) are gaining in ranks and nothing happened to them (most of them have even less content and not even SSL) Negative SEO is out of question, I check all links via ahrefs every other day. Any help is appreciated Thanks
Search Behavior | | s-s0 -
Are there better & inexpensive third party website analytics software over Google Analytics?
I've heard there are some third-party software that provide greater depth of information than Google Analytics, such as mouse tracking, heat mapping, video snapshots ect. Can anyone recommend a good program to use? I've tried a basic web-search but there seems to be a great variety of different ones.
Search Behavior | | Justin_hannan270 -
Better click through rate in 2nd position?
I'm digging through my Google Webmaster tools and found something really odd. On one particular keyword phrase Google is reporting a higher CTR on the 2nd position over the first. A lot higher. Per Google the 2nd position is getting a 31% CTR. Has anyone else seen this?
Search Behavior | | Thos0030 -
How can we provide geo-detection without hurting SEO?
We represent a franchise, and the parent site does well for head terms, but we want to add a feature with the nearest location to a consumer based on geo-detection. We don't want to hurt the rankings for broad head terms. Could we use an iFrame to present the closest shop without affecting the general SEO we have done?
Search Behavior | | lunavista-comm0 -
Better rank VS Better Title Tag
I changed my title tag to encourage a better CTR by looking less keyword stuffed and my rank dropped from #2 to #5. So what do you think is better a title that business name first unlike everyone else who is just keywords first or a more google friendly title that looks like everyone else?
Search Behavior | | greenjoe0 -
Would you say it is more bennificial to seperate keywords in the title tag tag of a page using a common ( keyword , keyword | Domain.com) or using a hyphen as SEOmoz best practices reccommends (keyword - keyword | domain.com)?
Title tag best practices according to seomoz is the following keyowrd - keyword | brand.com but I have seen some interesting results from using a comma as to a hyphen to seperate keywords as reccomended and wanted to know which method is more crawler friendly.
Search Behavior | | JHSpecialty0 -
Where can I find research into consumer behavior in URL input?
I have a hypothesis that the % of users that type URLs is decreasing. Instead I think users will be arriving at sites by clicking on links in emails, search and social. Where can I find data / research to back me up?
Search Behavior | | TomCritchlow0