Old / passed productpages
-
Hi, what shall i do with the old / passed productpages? The situation right now is, that all product url's are being saved wich cost me a lot of duplicate content and lot's of url's being indexed and crawled and no use to the website at all.
As there are affiliate links to those passed url's i want to give them a 301 to the category page wicht fitst best for a time of period?
Do you think that's the best solution? And what time of period shall ik give those 301 redirects?
Thnx and grtz, Leonie
-
Well i decided to give old product pages a 301 redirect, as long there is traffic on the url's, this wil be the best solution for this site. To leave the page up with a canonical, will create a messy site at the end. Thanx for all your replies!
Grtz, Leonie
-
Hi Erica,
yes they have, and they are shutting of those links, but still encounter 404's from the affiliate company. it's is progress
-
Definitely look at traffic and conversions, and start with those.
Also, re: affiliates, are the affiliates themselves complaining about 404s? Most any affiliate programs/management systems have the ability to shut off links. I assume they then inform affiliates to change links.
-
It takes all kinds :). I think to me maybe a learned response any time I click a link and see a redirect unless I implicitly trust the site I'm alt+f4'ing right away. I don't want popups, I don't want redirects I want to go where I say to go, even if where I said to go is empty. At least I got there and now can make a conscience choice what to do next.
Maybe just preference.
-
I would disagree, I would prefer to be taken to the sub category page to show me similar products with a message saying the product you was looking for is no longer available, please check out these very similar products - but I guess we all have different tastes and thats why as webmasters we can never please everybody
-
Thanks Donford, you really got a point to see it from a user perpective. and want to consider this also as an option and using the canonical of the parent.i'm talking about productpages that won't return anymore. For pages that will, we already cover like the way you described.
grtz, Leonie
-
Hi Leonie
I am not completely against 301's for these situations but from a user experience level I don't like when I got to X url and end up at Y url. I understand the reason from an SEO perspective but I don't like it from a user perspective. I take this into account when I make my decisions for my personal sites as well as my company's.
For e-commerce sites I prefer one of two methods. For products that "may" one day return I prefer to leave the page up, disable checkout / add to cart features and provide users similar buying choices along with an out of stock "email me when available again" option.
For products that will likely never be available again I still prefer to leave the page up, provide alternatives for them to buy, and then canonical the URL to parent. The second option works in two ways. First you don't miss the traffic from others linking to you, second you give the page's credit back to the parent category while reducing the no longer available page's chance of being a SERP result and up the parent's. Eventually the page will fall off the SERPs. Once a year you can do a sweep to see if any of the no longer available pages are getting any views if not then just remove them.
Both options provides users a better experience then "O you want to go here, O, I say you go here!" that 301's induce. I am not saying there is no place for 301's, in this sort of case I think the alternatives maybe a tad better, though maybe a little harder to implement.
-
Thanks Andy. i know affliate don't help SEO, but have 404 errors through the affiliate company, trying to solve it, but have to take care at this right now.about the time: difficult to say what's good, will monitore it the next period. 6 months sounds reasonable, though that are lots of 301 's
-
Hi
Firstly Affilaite links usually don't help towards SEO as they go through the affiliate company i.e. Awin, so the link juice actually is passed to awin, not yourself.
Once a product has sold out on our site, we 301 to the category page as this is the best user experience, while they can't get the exact product they are after at least they are still landing on a relevant section of the site - I've seen some examples where companies 301 to the homepage, but this isn't a good user experience.
Time periods for the 301s is a bit hard to say, I would track and see if they haven't had anybody click on the old link for 6 months to remove the 301 - but thats my opinion. Some would argue longer and I have spoken to others who say three months. What ever time period you do chose, keep an eye on 404 errors and if a decent number of these keep popping up, keep extending your 301 window.
Thanks
Andy
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
-
Moz/Google does not recognize text on Wix website
My client's website was built on Wix and despite having substantial content on web pages, Moz is claiming that there is very little-to-no content: Sufficient Characters/Words in Content. Does anyone know how to fix this issue? I've run a word count tool and it gives the same results. Website: pesclinical.com
Technical SEO | | Perfect-Pixel1 -
Rel Canonical, Follow/No Follow in htaccess?
Very quick question, are rel canonical, follow/no follow tags, etc. written in the htaccess file?
Technical SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Meta descriptions for specific categories/tags not showing?
Hi -- I'm really confused as to why only certain blog categories are not able to be crawled for their descriptions when their source codes look identical to other, crawlable pages on the same site? Specifically, Moz/other tools are not able to pull a meta description from the page http://www.koonz.com/category/videos/premises-liability-videos (and a few others) - while the source code looks almost identical to http://www.koonz.com/category/videos/federal-torts-claims-act-videos ?? Can anyone shed some light into possible issues for me? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | jessicamcdaniel0 -
Which Pagination/Canonicalization Page Selection Approach Should be Used?
Currently working on a retail site that has a product category page with a series of pages related to each other i.e. page 1, page 2, page 3 and Show All page. These are being identified as duplicate content/title pages. I want to resolve this through the applications of pagination to the pages so that crawlers know that these pages belong to the same series. In addition to this I also want to apply canonicalization to point to one page as the one true result that rules them all. All pages have equal weight but I am leaning towards pointing at the ‘Show All’. Catch is that products consistently change meaning that I am sometimes dealing with 4 pages including Show All, and other times I am only dealing with one page (...so actually I should point to page 1 to play it safe). Silly question, but is there a hard and fast rule to setting up this lead page rule?
Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma0 -
How to link site.com/blog or site.com/blog/
Hello friends, I have a very basic question but I can not find the right answer... I have made my blog linkbuilding using the adress "mysite.com/blog" but now im not sure if is better to do the linkbuilding to "mysite.com**/blog/ "** Is there any diference? Thanks...
Technical SEO | | lans27870 -
Block /tag/ or not?
I've asked this question in another area but now i want to ask it as a bigger question. Do we block /tag/ with robots.txt or not. Here's why I ask: My wordpress site does not block /tag/ and I have many /tag/ results in the top 10 results of Google. Have for months. The question is, does Google see /tag/ on WordPress as duplicate content? SEOMoz says it's duplicate content but it's a tag. It's not really content per say. I'm all for optimizing my site but Google is not penalizing me for /tag/ results. I don't want to block /tag/ if Google is not seeing it as duplicate content for only one reason and that's because I have many results in the top 10 on G. So, can someone who knows more about this weigh in on the subject for I really would like a accurate answer. Thanks in advance...
Technical SEO | | MyAllenMedia0 -
Is there any value to a home page URL adding the /index.html ?
For proper SEO, which version would you prefer? A. www.abccompany.com B. www.abccompany.com/index.html Is there any value or difference with either home page URL??
Technical SEO | | theideapeople0 -
Crawling image folders / crawl allowance
We recently removed /img and /imgp from our robots.txt file thus allowing googlebot to crawl our image folders. Not sure why we had these blocked in the first place, but we opened them up in response to an email from Google Product Search about not being able to crawl images - which can/has hurt our traffic from Google Shopping. My question is: will allowing Google to crawl our image files eat up our 'crawl allowance'? We wouldn't want Google to not crawl/index certain pages, and ding our organic traffic, because more of our allotted crawl bandwidth is getting chewed up crawling image files. Outside of the non-detailed crawl stat graphs from Webmaster Tools, what's the best way to check how frequently/ deeply our site is getting crawled? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | evoNick0