E-commerce: Taking care of expired product pages
-
Hi,
I work for an e-commerce company in the fashion sector. As you probably know/can guess it is very popular for bloggers and other influencers to link to our products. But the problem is that our products often have a lifespan of only 2-3 months before they expire.
Is the best solution to do a 301-redirect to the closest category page for expiring product pages? To make sure we don't lose these links to 404-pages.
Or are there any other good solutions popular among e-commerce companys?
Thanks for taking your time!
-
Those have been my main thoughts aswell. And you guys responses seem to agree with that. Thank you for your contribution!
-
Since you have popular bloggers/sites linking to your products, it's definitely a good idea to think about user experience. If the site is out of stock of the original item, it may be smart to just link to overarching category (for example, if it's a t-shirt, redirect it to the "tops" page).
-
In your case it may be worth it to do this: Keep the pages accessible, show that the product is no longer in stock and then show similar products the user may be interested in instead.
If this is not possible (too complicated, site too big), I would 301 redirect to the closest category page, maybe with a notification at the top that the product is no longer available and that is why the user was redirected to the category page.
Have a look at this blog post: https://econsultancy.com/blog/65562-seo-considerations-for-discontinued-products-in-ecommerce/
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
-
Search Console Indexed Page Count vs Site:Search Operator page count
We launched a new site and Google Search Console is showing 39 pages have been indexed. When I perform a Site:myurl.com search I see over 100 pages that appear to be indexed. Which is correct and why is there a discrepancy? Also, Search Console Page Index count started at 39 pages on 5/21 and has not increased even though we have hundreds of pages to index. But I do see more results each week from Site:psglearning.com My site is https://wwww.psglearning.com
Technical SEO | | pdowling0 -
3,511 Pages Indexed and 3,331 Pages Blocked by Robots
Morning, So I checked our site's index status on WMT, and I'm being told that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and the robots are blocking 3,331. This seems slightly odd as we're only disallowing 24 pages on the robots.txt file. In light of this, I have the following queries: Do these figures mean that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and blocking 3,331 other pages? Or does it mean that it's blocking 3,331 pages of the 3,511 indexed? As there are only 24 URLs being disallowed on robots.text, why are 3,331 pages being blocked? Will these be variations of the URLs we've submitted? Currently, we don't have a sitemap. I know, I know, it's pretty unforgivable but the old one didn't really work and the developers are working on the new one. Once submitted, will this help? I think I know the answer to this, but is there any way to ascertain which pages are being blocked? Thanks in advance! Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Pages Indexed Not Changing
I have several sites that I do SEO for that are having a common problem. I have submitted xml sitemaps to Google for each site, and as new pages are added to the site, they are added to the xml sitemap. To make sure new pages are being indexed, I check the number of pages that have been indexed vs. the number of pages submitted by the xml sitemap every week. For weeks now, the number of pages submitted has increased, but the number of pages actually indexed has not changed. I have done searches on Google for the new pages and they are always added to the index, but the number of indexed pages is still not changing. My initial thought was as new pages are added to the index, old ones are being dropped. But I can't find evidence of that, or understand why that would be the case. Any ideas on why this is happening? Or am I worrying about something that I shouldn't even be concerned with since new pages are being indexed?
Technical SEO | | ang1 -
Page feedback
We recently wrote a new website page to cover the direct mail services our organization offers. We kept the title tag to 70 characters, the meta description under 150 characters. H1 tag has what we feel is the most important term. If anyone out there has time to review & provide a little feedback, we'd really appreciate it. It would be great to know if it is built well and providing a solid end user experience. http://www.cushingco.com/print_products/additional_services/direct_mail.shtml At the moment, the only links pointing to this page are from our blog. One bit of content I am contemplating is a short paragraph - What is Direct Mail Marketing? Literally providing a short definition of it. The page was activated last Thursday and showing up in some Google results on the 4th/5th page but I am thinking this is probably just a temporary bump for now. Anyway, thanks in advance for any advice!!!
Technical SEO | | SEOSponge0 -
Find where the not selected pages are from
Hi all Can anyone suggest how I can find where gtoogle is finding approx. 1000 pages not to select? In round numbers I have 110 pages on the site site: searech shows all pages index status shows 110 slected and 1000 not selected. For the life of me I cannot fingure where these pages are coming from. I have set my prefered domain to www., setup 301 's to www. as per below RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^growingyourownveg.com$
Technical SEO | | spes123
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.growingyourownveg.com/$1" [R=301,L] site is www.growingyourownveg.com any suggestions much appreciated Simon0 -
Buying Expired Domains
Recently i was looking to buy some good quality Expired Domains. But while performing site and links query on such domains in google, none of the domains are showing any links or pages indexed in Google but the same domains are showing hundreds of links in opensiteexplorer for that domains. So does Google has started devaluing expired domains or will expired domains recover all their rankings after re registration by us.
Technical SEO | | amit910 -
Ranked on Page 1, now between page 40-50... Please help!
My site, http://goo.gl/h0igI was ranking on page one for many of our biggest keywords. All of a sudden, we completely fell off. I believe I'm down somewhere between page 40-50. I have no warning or error messages in webmaster tools. Can anyone please help me identify what the problem is? This is completely unexpected and I don't know how to fix it... Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Too many on page links for WP blog page
Hello, I have set my WP blog to a page so new posts go to that page making it the blog. On a SEOmoz campaign crawl, it says there are too many links on one page, so does this mean that as I am posting my blog posts to this page, the search engines are seeing the page as one page with links instead of the blog posts? I worry that if I continue to add more posts (which obviously I want to) the links will increase more and more, meaning that they will be discounted due to too many links. What can I do to rectify this? Many thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | mozUser14692366292850