Managing 404 Product Pages
-
Happy Friday!
I'm managing an Ecommerce site that has tons of product pages showing up as 404s. These product pages also have ridiculous query strings. I wanted to know how other webmasters deal with inactive product pages. Thanks!
-
The ONLY last thing I would add.
I'm sure you will notice a lot of eCommerce websites will keep products that they don't sell anymore, and just keep them as "sold out". People still hit those products and land on those pages.
Check and see how often people are hitting these products. If some of these pages have some juice left, it might be worth recreating a page in its place for a product that isn't being sold anymore and up sell for something you are selling. Or as Ricky said above me, 301 them.
Don't just prune everything at once. Slow and steady wins the race. Make sure you know what you are cutting before you cut it.
-
For inactive product pages I think it's usually best to send them to a 404 page. I'd make sure the 404 page includes a nice index of product categories and a mention that the product or page they were looking for is out of stock.
These pages don't usually contain much link value, so you shouldn't worry too much about having to set up 301s to similar products etc.
-RIcky
-
Hi there
What I would do is first review this resource from Matt Cutts on how to handle out of stock products moving forward for your inventories. This will help you handle 404s and redirects in the future.
From there, what you can do is see what URLs should not be crawled and indexed based on query strings. See which ones you should noindex, disallow, or nofollow, but you can also let Google know which parameters to ignore in Search Console. When doing all of this, I hiiiiighly recommend having a professional handle this. Reason being - you don't want to inadvertently noindex pages that should be being indexed, or have a ton of redirects happening when they don't need to be.
Let me know if this helps or doesn't fully answer your question! Good luck!
Patrick
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
-
What keywords will this page possibly rank for ... tool?
Hi all, I'm looking for a tool that will look at a web page that you submit to it and tell you what keywords it thinks the page is targetted towards and thus hopefully rank for. Does anyone have any suggestions please? Hopefully this type of tool will help us understand why page A is being ranked for keyword X when page B is actually the page that should be being ranked for that keyword. The only tool I have really found so far is http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html I dont want to tell the tool what keywords I am looking at, as with Moz On page grader. Background reason (and possibly some one maybe able to shed some light on this also). We list a group of products... Nextbase Click 9 Lite, Nextbase Click 9 Lite Duo and Nextbase Click 9 Lite Duo Deluxe. All 3 are similar but very different products and each has its own page on our site. For the keyphrase "Nextbase click 9 lite" currently in Google we are listed for the pages containing the "Nextbase Click 9 Lite Duo" and "Nextbase Click 9 Lite Duo Deluxe"... but not the actual specific product page that targets the "Nextbase Click 9 Lite" product. Thus my reason for wanting to try such a tool that may help me understand why this is. Thanks for any hints, tips or pointers.
SEO Learn Center | | jasef0 -
Index Page Dropped From Rankings
On average my site was getting ranked 3rd for "Tucson DUI Lawyer", Best Tucson DUI Lawyer, Tucson DUI attorney and etc. Recently my website fell for all of these keywords and I thought it is the best time to launch the new website. The problem is that my internal pages show up for some of the keywords on the third or fourth page but my index page doesn't show for any of them. Does it have anything to do with the site structure ? I have a lot of news excerpts on the homepage with links to the main posts. Here is the link: http://www.michaelharwinlaw.com/ Any help is sincerely appreciated.
SEO Learn Center | | yasinyaqoobi0 -
How to ask Google to remove old pages that don't exist
I have moved a site to a new location. There are a number of pages that date back to 2012 and 2011 and we do not want them anymore. Is there a way to ask Google to remove these pages entirely.
SEO Learn Center | | mayanksaxena0 -
Off Page SEO Topic
Hi, I want to know a list of off page SEO topics (panda and penguin friendly) what will drive traffic. Can you help me? Al
SEO Learn Center | | bayezid0 -
Wikipedia Page
I need to start a wikipedia page for our business, any good how to articles or videos I should read prior to? Advice or anything I need to know before taking this on? Thank you!
SEO Learn Center | | cbeuoy0 -
I want to Learn Advance Off-page Optimization
Hello, I want to learn advance SEO and off-page optimization ? how can i get started ? please suggest me, I have knowledge of on-page optimizations and basic knowledge of off-page optimization too Please explain these terms and let me know which is most effective and which one is no longer effected, how to do, why etc • Blogs Writing & Submission
SEO Learn Center | | softcorner
• Do Follow Link Building
• Account Creation & Profile Completion • Directory Submission
• RSS Feed Submission
• Social Bookmarking
• Social Networking
• Social Media Marketing
• Forums Writing0 -
Webinar Sound Quality: Online Reputation Management
Anyone else having difficult hearing Rhea's webinar: Online Reputation Management? I can barely understand what she is saying in this video.
SEO Learn Center | | GreatFence0 -
What are the things I should tell my website developer to keep in mind for on-page SEO wise while outsourcing it?
I have done the keyword research for my target and will do the copy writing in-house suited for both visitors and bots.Like suitable headers and mention of keyword in the content,mention of keyword in link,having video in the page if possible etc. I need some help for a proper interlinking strategy and main question is, what are the things to be taken care of in coding/development SEO wise,which should be told to developer. I am going for custom development in .NET platform( if it matters anyway ) My site will have 3 products/services page and rest are resources and Q&A community. I am targeting the keywords for 3 products. Q&A community and resources should help me in long tail keywords. Any kind of advice,suggestion is welcome. Thanks
SEO Learn Center | | RyanSat0