Links On Out Of Stock Product Pages Causing 404
-
Hi Moz Community!
We're doing an audit of our e-commerce site at the moment and have noticed a lot of 404 errors coming from out of stock/discontinued product pages that we've kept 200 in the past. We kept these and added links on them for categories or products that are similar to the discontinued items but many other links of the page like images, blog posts, and even breadcrumbs have broken or are no longer valid causing lots of additional 404s.
If the product has been discontinued for a long time and gets no traffic and has no link equity would you recommend adding a noindex robots tag on these pages so we're not wasting time fixing all the broken links on these?
Any thoughts?Thanks
-
Hi Anthony,
Thanks for that response, that makes a lot of sense.
Best,
Zack
-
Hi Zack,
- If you want the products to still be accessible/visible on the site, you could leave the pages as 200 with a NoIndex tag.
- If you want the products gone from the site and from Google's index, you could go the 301, 404, 410 route.
Considering there are multiple decent options available, consider going with the one that will be easy for your team to implement and maintain over time.
-
Hi Anthony,
Thanks for your reply, we have a very high turn over rate for products and many items go out of stock frequently. Would you recommend just noindexing the out of stock pages that don't have any traffic or links and are very old so they don't waste crawl budget? Normally it takes a while for Google to take 404 or 410 pages out of their index especially if the pages are old and don't get crawled very often.
Thanks
Zack
-
- No traffic and no link equity = let it 404 or give it a 410
- If there is any equity (traffic/links) 301 redirect it to a related product or the category/subcategory 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
-
Linking to a Resource from a multi-language Page
I have a multi-language page where the content is available in several versions (translated). I want to link to a resource that is only available in one English. Is it a good idea to link to this resource from all language versions or should I better include the link only in the English version of my page? In the first scenario for example a Spanisch and a German language version would link to a page in English. Is this ok or could it be considered spam?
Technical SEO | | ConverterApp0 -
50,000 pages or a page with parameters
I have a site with about 12k pages on a topic... each of these pages could use another several pages to go into deeper detail about the topic. So, I am wondering, for SEO purposes would it be better to have something like 50,000 new pages for each sub topic or have one page that I would pass parameters to and the page would be built on the fly in code behind. The drawback to the one page with parameters is that the URL would be static but the effort to implement would be minimal. I am also not sure how google would index a single page with parameters. The drawback to the 50k pages model is the dev effort and possibly committed some faux pas by unleashing so many links to my internal pages. I might also have to mix aspx with html because my project can't be that large. Anyone here ever have this sort of choice to make? Is there a third way I am not considering?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Translating Page Titles & Page Descriptions
I am working on a site that will be published in the original English, with localized versions in French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. All the versions will use the English information architecture. As part of the process, we will be translating the page the titles and page descriptions. Translation quality will be outstanding. The client is a translation company. Each version will get at least four pairs of eyes including expert translators, editors, QA experts and proofreaders. My question is what special SEO instructions should be issued to translators re: the page titles and page descriptions. (We have to presume the translators know nothing about SEO.) I was thinking of: stick to the character counts for titles and descriptions make sure the title and description work together avoid over repetition of keywords page titles (over-optimization peril) think of the descriptions as marketing copy try to repeat some title phrases in the description (to get the bolding and promote click though) That's the micro stuff. The macro stuff: We haven't done extensive keyword research for the other languages. Most of the clients are in the US. The other language versions are more a demo of translation ability than looking for clients elsewhere. Are we missing something big here?
Technical SEO | | DanielFreedman0 -
I am trying to correct error report of duplicate page content. However I am unable to find in over 100 blogs the page which contains similar content to the page SEOmoz reported as having similar content is my only option to just dlete the blog page?
I am trying to correct duplicate content. However SEOmoz only reports and shows the page of duplicate content. I have 5 years worth of blogs and cannot find the duplicate page. Is my only option to just delete the page to improve my rankings. Brooke
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
302 Redirect of Home Page - Lost Link Juice?
I've got a new client whose site is set up to redirect the home page to another URL, like www.example.com, redirecting to www.example.com/home/, using a 302 redirect. Am I correct in assuming that links pointing directly to www.example.com are not passing their full value because it is being redirected with a 302 rather than 301? (In a nutshell, I want to make sure this resource is still accurate: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection)
Technical SEO | | kpclaypool0 -
Does having a page (or site) available on HTTP and HTTPS cause duplication issues?
Say I've got a site that can be accessed using either protocal (i.e. HTTP and HTTPS), but most (if not all of the links) are pointing to the HTTP versions. Will it cause a problem if I start link building to HTTPS versions? In other words does google see http://mysite.com as the same page as https://mysite.com? Thanks
Technical SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Page rank 2 for home page, 3 for service pages
Hey guys, I have noticed with one of our new sites, the home page is showing page rank two, whereas 2 of the internal service pages are showing as 3. I have checked with both open site explorer and yahoo back links and there are by far more links to the home page. All quality and relevant directory submissions and blog comments. The site is only 4 months old, I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the fact 2 of the lesser linked pages are showing higher PR? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nextman0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Title for product pages. Is there a way to fix it?
We we're doing pretty good with our SEO, until we added product listing pages. The errors are mostly Duplicate Page Content/Title. e.g. Title: Masterpet | New Zealand Products MasterPet Product page1 MasterPet Product page2 Because the list of products are displayed on several pages, the crawler detects that these two URLs have the same title. From 0 Errors two weeks ago, to 14k+ errors. Is this something we could fix or bother fixing? Will our SERP ranking suffer because of this? Hoping someone could shed some light on this issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Peter.Huxley590