404's and Ecommerce - Products no longer for sale
-
Hi
We regularly have products which are no longer sold and discontinued. As we have such a large site, webmaster tools regularly picks up new 404's.
These 404 pages aren't linked to from anywhere on the site any longer, however WMT will still report them as errors. Does this affect site authority?
Thank you
-
Great answers, thank you for the links!
-
410 & 404's are treated almost the same way by bots (the 410 just gives a stronger indication that the page is gone forever) - check this article http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-explains-differences-404-410-status-codes-189060 - so a 410 is also a valable option. As most sites already have a custom 404 page I guess the 404 solution is the easiest one;
I forgot to mention in my first reply - but there is also a good article on out-of-stock products on Moz: https://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content
Dirk
-
What's the thought on using a 410 server response (Gone) for products that won't be in stock on the site anymore? I've seen that strategy work to get pages out of the index. Does anyone have opposition to using that strategy? That would be assuming the page isn't linked to on the site (or other sites for that matter). I've seen that work OK for product pages buried a littler further in the site architecture.
-
Hi Dirk,
Great thank you, I don't get any on my site crawls so that's a plus!
-
It's nothing to worry about - they will disappear after a while (if you don't link to them on your site). It's quite normal to have them & they have no SEO impact (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?hl=en)
You could check this advice from Matt Cuts here: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2334932/ecommerce-seo-tips-for-unavailable-products-from-googles-matt-cutts- for larger sites he advices to use the "unavailable after" metatag (http://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2007/07/robots-exclusion-protocol-now-with-even.html)
Dirk
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
-
Duplicate content URLs from bespoke ecommerce CMS - what's the best solution here?
Hi Mozzers Just noticed this pattern on a retail website... This URL product.php?cat=5 is also churning out products.php?cat=5&sub_cat= (same content as product.php?cat=5 but from this different URL - this is a blank subcat - there are also unique subcat pages with unique content - but this one is blank) How should I deal with that? and then I'm seeing: product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 and product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000&cont_ref=giftselector (same content as product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 but from this different URL) How should I deal with that? This is a bespoke ecommerce CMS (unfortunately). Any pointers would be great 🙂 Best wishes, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Big discrepancies between pages in Google's index and pages in sitemap
Hi, I'm noticing a huge difference in the number of pages in Googles index (using 'site:' search) versus the number of pages indexed by Google in Webmaster tools. (ie 20,600 in 'site:' search vs 5,100 submitted via the dynamic sitemap.) Anyone know possible causes for this and how i can fix? It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag? Any help appreciated, Karen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Google's form for "Small sites that should rank better" | Any experiences or results?
Back in August of 2013 Google created a form that allowed people to submit small websites that "should be ranking better in Google". There is more info about it in this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-small-site-survey-17295.html Has anybody used it? Any experiences or results you can share? *private message if you do not want to share publicly...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
Product Descriptions for a product with many designs
I'm a newbie with SEO and I have a question regarding product descriptions. Let's say I am selling 100 dog id tags. The tags are all made of same materials, same size, just different designs. Now for the product description, do I need to write a different set of description for all 100 tags? This is an example of a short product description(there's more) for all the pet tags: Personalized with 4 lines of information and 20 characters in each line. Lifetime guarantee - If your pet ID tag ever becomes illegible, we will replace it free of charge. Solid one-piece construction - No glued or ""sandwiched"" materials to wear out or fall apart. Split ring for collar attachement included with EVERY tag. Countless uses - School backpacks, luggage, fashion accessories, and many more! All of the above information pertains to all the pet tags. Can all my product descriptions contain that information, or will I need to modify this 100 times for each individual pet tag? I read up a lot on duplicate content so I am slightly confused. Will this hurt my SEO? Thanks, Keith
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ktw0160 -
Is there anyway to recover my site's rankings?
My site has been top 3 for 'speed dating' on Google.co.uk since about 2003 and it went to below top 50 for a lot of it's main keywords shortly after 27 Oct 2012. I did a re-submission request and was told there was 'no manual spam action'. My conclusions is I was dropped by Google because of poor quality links I've gained over 10+ years. I have a Domain Authority of 40, a regular blog http://bit.ly/oKyi88, a KLOUT of 42, user reviews and quality content. Since Oct 2012 I've done some technical improvements and managed to get a few questionable links removed. I've continued blogging reguarly and got more active on Twitter. I've seen no improvement and my traffic is 80% down on last year. It would be great to be able to produce content that others want to link to but I've not had much success from that in over 10 years of trying and I've not seen many others in my sector, with small budgets having much success. Is there anything I can do to regain favour with Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0 -
Google's Exact Match Algorithm Reduced Our Traffic!
Google's first Panda de-valued our Web store, www.audiobooksonline.com, and our traffic went from 2500 - 3000 (mostly organic referrals) per month to 800 - 1000. Google's under-valuing of our Web store continued to reduce our traffic to 400-500 for the past few months. From 4/5/2013 to 4/6/2013 our traffic dropped 50% more, because (I believe) of Google's "exact domain match" algorithm implementation. We were, even after Panda and up to 4/5/2013 getting a significant amount of organic traffic for search terms such as "audiobooks online," "audio books online," and "online audiobooks." We no longer get traffic for these generic keywords. What I don't understand is why a UK company, www.audiobooksonline.co.uk/, with a very similar domain name, ranks #5 for "audio books online" and #4 for "audiobooks online" while we've almost disappeared from Google rankings. By any measurement I am aware of, our site should rank higher than audiobooksonline.co.uk. Market Samurai reports for "audio books online" and "audiobooks online" shows that our Web store is significantly "stronger" than audiobooksonline.co.uk but they show up on Google's first page and we are down several pages. I also checked a few titles on audiobooksonline.co.uk and confirmed they are using the same publisher descriptions we and many other online book / audiobook merchants do = duplicate content. We have never received notice that our Web store was being penalized. Why would audiobooksonline.co.uk rank so much higher than audiobooksonline.com? Does Google treat non-USA sites different than USA sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen0 -
Is Google's reinclusion request process flawed?
We have been having a bit of a nightmare with a Google penalty (please see http://www.browsermedia.co.uk/2012/04/25/negative-seo-or-google-just-getting-it-painfully-wrong/ or http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/10093-why-google-needs-to-be-less-kafkaesque for background information - any thoughts on why we have been penalised would be very, very welcome!) which has highlighted a slightly alarming aspect of Google's reinclusion process. As far as I can see (using Google Analytics), supporting material prepared as part of a reinclusion request is basically ignored. I have just written an open letter to the search quality team at http://www.browsermedia.co.uk/2012/06/19/dear-matt-cutts/ which gives more detail but the short story is that the supporting evidence that we prepared as part of a request was NOT viewed by anyone at Google. Has anyone monitored this before and experienced the same thing? Does anyone have any suggestions regarding how to navigate the treacherous waters of resolving a penalty? This no doubt sounds like a sob story for us, but I do think that this is a potentially big issue and one that I would love to explore more. If anyone could contribute from the search quality team, we would love to hear your thoughts! Cheers, Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrowserMediaLtd0 -
Ranking for our member's company names without giving them all away!
Hi, We have a directory of 25,000 odd companies who use our site. We have a strong PR site and want to rank a page for each company name. Some initial testing on one or two company names brings us to #2 after the company's own web site in the format: "Company Name Reviews and Feedback" - so it works well. We want to do this for all 25,000 of our members, however we do not wish to make it easy for our competitors to scrape through our member database!! e.g. using: www.ourdomain.com/randomstring/company-name-(profile).php unfortunately with the above performing a search on google for site:domain.com/()/()(profile).php would bring up all records. Are there any tried and tested ways of achieving what we're after here? Many Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0