Ecommerce catalog update: 301 redirects?
-
Hello mozers,
We run an ecommerce store and are planning a massive catalog update this month. Essentially, 100% of our product listings will be deleted, and an all new catalog will be uploaded. The new catalog contains mostly new products, however there are some products that already existing in the old catalog as well.
The new catalog has a bunch of improvements to the product pages, included optimized meta titles and descriptions, multiple language, optimized URLs and more.
My question is the following:
When we delete the existing catalog, all indexed URLs will return 404 errors. Setting up 301 redirects from old to new products (for products which existing previously) is not feasible given the number of products. Also, many products are simply being remove entirely.
So should we go ahead and delete all products, upload the new catalog, update the sitemap, resubmit it for crawling, and live with a bunch of 404 errors until these URLs get dropped from Google?
The alternative I see is setting 301 redirects to the home page, but I am not sure this would be correct use of 301 redirects.
Thanks for your input.
-
Thanks for the info.
In my books a 301 redirect is for a direct replacement of an old webpage for a new one. I knew a bunch of 404 errors would be problematic, but I was also worried setting up 301 redirects to the home page (which is not a replacement for the product page being removed) would not agree with best practices.
Also good point regarding existing incoming links pointing to the pages being removed.
I think what we'll do is export URLs from the Google index, and either set a 301 redirect to the new product page (if it exists) or if not we'll 301 redirect to that product's category page.
-
I don't fully agree with the answer above - having 404's is not a direct cause for demoting. Check https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html . Another interesting video on expired e-commerce products is here: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882. Redirecting to the homepage (or any other non related page) is certainly not a good thing - this would be considered a soft 404.
It is however best practice to redirect products that remain in the catalog to the newer versions of the page. Even for those that don't remain in catalog you might consider to redirect them to a closely related new product. You indicate that given the number of products this would be not feasible. Are there no common patterns in the url to redirect these pages in bulk? Is it possible to put the redirect in the page header?
Redirects (properly implemented = going to the corresponding content) are both good for users & Google. If you don't redirect it will take some time before the new products are indexed and replacing the old ones in the ranking - which will almost certainly lead to rank loss: the 404 results will quickly disappear from the results and it will take a lot longer for the new ones to take their positions, it they manage to get back to these positions at all.
If you happen to have links point to these old product pages - you will loose these as well if they go to a 404.
In case that redirects is indeed not a valid option - make sure that you have a custom 404 pages so that user can easily find what their looking for. It might reduce the damage a bit.
If it was my site - I would try to find a solution to implement 301's.
Dirk
-
You should definitely not let those URLs die. Having a ton of 404 errors is a sure fire way to have Google demote your site for poor quality. I recommend selecting your top 100 or so products, based on Google Analytics traffic numbers and importance to your business, and apply one-to-one 301 redirects for those. The rest of the old products can be redirected to the homepage, or maybe the main store page.
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
-
Redirection Problem
I have a site that has 2,50,000 pages and I want to redirect to another domain. Is it good practice for SEO and google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari0 -
301 redirect to avoid duplicate content penalty
I have two websites with identical content. Haya and ethnic Both websites have similar products. I would like to get rid of ethniccode I have already started to de-index ethniccode. My question is, Will I get any SEO benefit or Will it be harmful if I 301 direct the below only URL’s https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez -> https://www.hayacreations/collections/salwar-kameez https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez/anarkali-suits - > https://www.hayacreations/collections/anarkali-suits
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
301 redirects aren't passing value.
We recently migrated our shop to a new platform. We are using Wordpress for our main website, but we wanted a separate installation of Wordpress for our shop, so we left the main blog where it was, but moved the shop to a /shop/ sub directory with it's on WP installation. So now we have 2 installations of Wordpress. However, since we've done this, none of the pages on the new shop are ranking for anything. Their page rank is 0, and Moz page authority is 1 for every page on the new site. I've set up the proper 301 redirects, and they're redirecting fine, but none of the page value is coming over. It's been about a week now, and despite re-crawls by google, I'm not seeing any change. Also, one of the original (now re-directed) product pages still has a Page Authority of 13 according to Open Site Explorer. I know it's not high, but it had us ranking in the top 5 for a very important keyword, and now that value is being wasted. For example, one of our product pages that was ranking well was startupfashion.com/product/fashion-brand-line-sheet-template
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inkyj
That page is now redirected to
http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/fashion-line-sheet-template I've done 301's plenty of times and I've never seen this issue, so i'm wondering if it could have something to do with having multiple installations of Wordpress. I can't see any obvious issues with it... i have the Yoast SEO plugin configured properly on both installations, and all of the pages ARE being indexed by google. Not sure what is going on. Anyone have any experience with this, or have any ideas? Thanks!!0 -
How is my 301 redirected site stealing rankings from the main site?
Hello, I have a site, drhobelt.com, that 301 redirects to the main site, drhonow.com. Not only is drhobelt.com still indexed, but it recently stole rankings from drhonow.com for "decompression belt" related terms. What could be causing this? How do I reclaim the rankings for drhonow.com? Thanks for reading!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Multiple 301 Redirects on the same domain name
Hi, I'd appreciate some advice ont he below. I have a website, say www.site.co.uk that has just been redesigned using a new CMS. Previously it had URLs in the format /article.php?id=123, the new site has more friendly urls in the format /articles/article-slug. I have been able to import the old articles into my CMS using the same article IDs and I have created a unique slug for each post. So now in my database, I have the article id (from the querystring) and a slug. However, I have hundreds of old URLs indexed by Google in the format /article.php?id=123 and need to redirect these. My plan was to do the following. 301 Redirect /article.php?id=123 to an intermediate page, in this case /redirect/123. On this intermediate page I would do a database lookup for the article slug, based on the ID from the querystring, create a new URL and perform a second 301 redirect to my new URL E.g. /articles/article-slug-from-database. Whilst this works and keeps the site usable for visitors the two 301 redirects do worry me, as I don;t want Google indexing lots of /redirect/[article id] urls. The other solution is to generate hundreds of htaccess redirect rules that map old url to the new url. The first solution is much cleaner, but the two 301's worry me. Will Google work this out on it's own, is there a better way? Any advice is much appreciated. Cheers Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyCrompton1 -
Redirect advice
My website has two versions of the homepage: http://www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/http://www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/index.cfmI wondered if I could set up a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file so that only the http://www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk page was returned as the homepage?Colin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NileCruises0 -
Have a problem with our home page. Is temporary 301 redirect an option?
Hey Mozers, I discovered this morning that the home page for my website is rendering fine in Chrome and Firefox, but very poorly in IE. My analytics show that over 50% of my visitors are using IE. As a result of the problem, IE has a bounce rate 32% higher than other browsers. I'm not a web developer and I'm fairly new to SEO, so I'm guessing that it's going to take me at least a couple days to get it fixed. In the meantime, I was considering doing a 301 redirect from the home page to the largest category page in hopes of keeping some of the IE users from bouncing while I get the home page sorted out. Would there be any long term negative effects from this once I get the page sorted out and take the 301 off it? Are there any other solutions that would be better? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matthewbyers0 -
Open Site Explorer not Seeing 301 Redirect to non-www
I cannot figure out why open site explorer doesn't see that when you go to http://preferredroofingkc.net/ it redirects to http://www.preferredroofingkc.net/ This is a wordpress installation that uses a cannonical url http://www.preferredroofingkc.net/ The HTACCESS file also has a 301 redirect as follows: RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertFisher
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^preferredroofingkc.net [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.preferredroofingkc.net/$1 [L,R=301] But, open site explorer still shows these sites separately without alerting that there is a 301 redirect.0