Any problem with launching a redesigned site early without a few product categories?

[Deacyde]

Hello,

My client wants to launch a redesign early, problem is they want to do this without a majority of their product pages, since the bulk of their sales aren't from these missing categories, will the resulting 404s hurt them?

What is up, is the major pages structured around their primary keyword, most of their sales isn't from the product pages, but from the quotes turned into sales. Big ticket items aren't sold through the cart, they are call or email for quotes and normally those quotes are turned into sales once they realize the price is better.

We will be adding these missing categories and products, just one section at a time. Since 404s don't hurt, and we don't rank very well from the products missing, should I be concerned about any thing else?

Thank you

[KristinaKledzik]

Sounds like you've got a solid plan! Good luck, and make sure to let your boss and coworkers know that you will almost definitely see a temporary decrease in organic traffic through this process. It doesn't mean that you've ruined it, just that Google needs to adjust.

Good luck!

[Deacyde]

Thank you!

I've gone through a 301 the urls we were doing good SEO wise with, however I would rather let the ones that panda seemed to not like get 404d and let them start a new with the revised urls as we bring them online at a later date.

This site had most of the SEO mojo going to the homepage since before I got my hands on the site, they didn't monitor backlinks well nor keyword usage and focused on the homepage as the SEO hub. Not knowing to tamper keywords accordingly throughout the site, keeping relative keywords only on the pages they best fit on.

The site ranked so poorly for the urls we're removing, as well the products weren't very profitable it at all. So keeping what worked best on the site was our focus while removing what wasn't helpful to the user or us.

Thank you again for the advice and I've certainly utilized what both of you have mentioned for what we really want to keep. And will be allowing the urls we're not happy with any longer to 404.

[KristinaKledzik]

I'd recommend somehow keeping the current pages and continuing to link to them, or quickly creating crappy new versions of the pages on your site, just as placeholders. They can even have the proper H1, but the rest can be "coming soon."

In general, if you want to remove content, 404s are fine, it's only a problem if you want to bring that content back later; it'll essentially be new content if you 404ed, and you'll lose all of that good SEO mojo you'd build for that content over time.

If you're reducing the site down by that many pages but don't want to lose rankings, here's what I'd do:

1. Identify all pages with a significant amount of organic traffic and/or inbound links.
2. 301 redirect each of those pages to a page on your new site with similar content.

This can be pretty time consuming, but it'll save you a lot of organic traffic!

Good luck,

Kristina

[Deacyde]

Thank you,

So what's the best course of action to take, if I want to keep these categories off the new site but will be adding them later on? How is it recommended to handle the resulting 404s?

I'm sure this happens in other sites, either a discontinuation of a product category, and a consolidation of products in general, or even site's hit by panda, how do they keep the content not seen and not affect them with the 404s if they do remove?

I thought about nofollow noindex but these products they want off completely for now.

We're going from about 664 pages to 130 pages internally.

We'll be removing 531 urls when we launch this new site in a week. All 531 pages are products that we will be working on their descriptions and overall SEO in general, but are not ready to go live with them.

[ChrisAshton]

404s do hurt both user experience and ranking potential. As far as rankings go, it will hurt you site-wide too since it's an indication of your site's quality.

Releasing it without some products isn't the end of the world. The 404s will be a problem though - I would not recommend launching a website with any 404s, much less a collection of them.

If the links to these pages are just in the nav, it should be easy enough to comment those out temporarily so you don't see those 404s. What you end up with then is just a website that sells fewer products really.