Discontinued Product on a Ecommerce site
-
To create a better customer experience, rather then remove discontinued product from a site, we remove many links from the page, and remove it from the navigation of the site, but we keep the url and show that the product can no longer be purchased. This keeps the links, keeps the content, and gives customers the opportunity to find other products we have. But I often wonder if we should allow this items to just 404 and be done with them. Here is an example. http://www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-dyn-bm5a-list. Any advice?
-
Thanks all, I'm glad 75% of you agree with my method. Thanks for the input!
-
Great advice from Massimilano and Monica - always consider customer experience in the equation as a major factor alongside your on-page ranking factors.
Avoid the 404's and retain the traffic by suggesting alternatives that are relevant to their original query and you won't go far wrong.
Cheers and best of luck moving forward!
-
I couldn't agree with Massimilano more. That page still has value because it can potentially bring traffic to alternative products. I am not a fan of redirecting or 404ing a page that still brings traffic. And as a consumer I don't want to automatically be redirected to what I am not looking for. If I were chances are I would leave the site.
I would definitely add the page back to the navigation and make sure you don't remove anymore links. Then I would state the product is discontinued and add links to similar products. Here is an example of a page that I did on my site.
-
I think showing information about the product, making clear the product can no longer be purchased and encouraging the visitor to buy alternatives is the right thing to do.
404 is out of question, it means you are removing it from SERP, why do that? You want to have as much pages in SERP as possible.
Think about those visitors, they got on that page looking specifically for that product. If you redirect/301 them to something else, you do not serve them the information they were looking for, and you may redirect them to content they are not interested into.
The only case where I would do a 301 is if the discontinued product page has tons of backlink and a terrific page authority, in other words an incredible amount of page juice to transfer.
Checking the example you linked, that page has PA 1 and zero backlinks, so there's no advantage in doing a 301.
One final notice, I am not an expert of music supply but I think you can do a much much better job at suggesting alternatives, if I look at that page I can't see any alternative product, I would suggest alternatives prominently on top of the page with a short reference+link where you state the product is no longer available, or something like that.
-
Hi,
I personally would create a 301 redirect to the closest relevant page (for example their category), and if the website has a blog, I would create a new entry telling my customers that unfortunately we have discontinued Product X.
This way I'd keep the link juice gathered by that specific product page, and distribute it towards a relevant page.
Gr., Keszi
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
-
Backlinks from an Association Site
My company is joining an Industrial Association. Part of the membership is a link to our site from theirs. I've found that going to their site triggers a "threat alert" through our company malware detection system and shows a link that may be infected with malware. With all of that said I have (2) questions... Since this is a paid membership, will Google penalize us for having a link to our company from this association's website? Since a link on their site has potential malware issues, should we add our link to their site or could it be harmful to us? Any helpful advice is appreciated.
Technical SEO | | SteveZero121 -
Unique page for each product variant? (Not eCommerce)
Hi Mozzers, Just looking for a little advice before I launch into a huge workload. We have landing pages for vehicle manufacturers. We then have anchor links in that page for each vehicle model that manufacturer has, with further info on the model further down the page. So we're toying with the idea of launching a unique page for each of the models rather than having them all on the same landing page. This will take an age and a minute but if it is worth it, we want to do it. Do you guys see a benefit to having unique pages for each model? Do you think it would attract more natural links? Would this help or hinder the manufacturer landing page in general? Should the manufacturer landing page be noindex so as to avoid duplicate content issues? I can see a lot of work and risk, just looking for a few opinions. PM for more info. Thanks a lot people, Jamie
Technical SEO | | SanjidaKazi0 -
Site removed from Google Index
Hi mozers, Two months ago we published http://aquacion.com We registered it in the Google Webmaster tools and after a few day the website was in the index no problem. But now the webmaster tools tell us the URLs were manually removed. I've look everywhere in the webmaster tools in search for more clues but haven't found anything that would help me. I sent the acces to the client, who might have been stupid enough to remove his own site from the Google index, but now, even though I delete and add the sitemap again, the website won't show in Google SERPs. What's weird is that Google Webmaster Tools tells us all the page are indexed. I'm totally clueless here... Ps. : Added screenshots from Google Webmaster Tools. Update Turns out it was my mistake after all. When my client developped his website a few months ago, he published it, and I removed the website from the Google Index. When the website was finished I submited the sitemap, thinking it would void the removal request, but it don't. How to solve In webmaster tools, in the [Google Index => Remove URLs] page, you can reinclude pages there. tGib0
Technical SEO | | RichardPicard0 -
Site Map Problems or Are They?
According to webmaster tools my Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt Our site map is generically generated and encompasses all web pages, whether I have excluded them using the robots.txt file As far as I am aware this has never been an issue until recently. Is this hurting my rankings and how do I fix it? Secondly, webmaster tools says there is over 5,000 error/warnings on my site map. But site map is only 1,400 or so pages submitted. How do I see what is going on?
Technical SEO | | Professor0 -
Site being indexed by Google before it has launched
We are currently coming towards the end of migrating one of our retail sites over to magento. To our horror, we find out today that some pages are already being indexed by Google, and we have started receiving orders through new site. Do you have any suggestions for what may have caused this? Or similarly, what the best solution would be to de-index ourselves? We most recently excluded anything with a certain parameter from robots.txt - could this being implemented incorrectly have caused this issue? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Product Reviews.
Hi. In the last few days I have studied a little bit about this, and I would like to know the opinion of experts. My website www.theprinterdepo.com is a Magento site and I have the product review disabled by default because nobody makes reviews. However I have seen that other vendors out there have big databases of reviews that can be plugged in into my website. www.powerreviews.com for example Will this really boost my site? seo talking? If so, any other provider you can recommend me, www.powerreviews.com seems too expensive.
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Replacing a site map
We are in the process of changing our folder/url structure. Currently we have about 5 sitemaps submitted to Google. How is it best to deal with these site maps in terms of either (a) replacing the old URLs with the new ones in the site map and (b) what affect should we have if we removed the site map submission from the Google Webmaster Tools console. Basically we have in the region of 20,000 urls to redirect to the new format, and to update in the site map.
Technical SEO | | NeilTompkins0 -
What are the pros and cons of moving one site onto a subdomain of another site?
Two sites. One has weaker sales. What would the benefits and problems for SEO of moving the weak site from its own domain to a subdomain of the stronger site?
Technical SEO | | GriffinHansen0