Dealing with Dead Pages on an Ecommerce Site
-
Hello everyone!
I'm working on a project for a small jewelry store. They have a store in North Carolina and an ecommerce site (on Shopify - which I loathe!). I'm not exactly an SEO expert, but the client likes the way I handle social media and I know enough to get them much farther down the road than they are now.
The big problem is that most everything sold is handmade and one of a kind. So, the site has LOTS of dead links. I'd love everyone's suggestions on how to:
- Best avoid this in the first place as new products are added and promoted via Facebook, Twitter, blog posts and so on
- Suggestions for managing the sold items - I don't think it seems wise to leave them up as "SOLD"
The site is http://www.laurajamesjewelry.com
I'm grateful for your assistance! And look forward to sharpening my SEO skills.
~Robin
-
We don't have the unique products that you do but here is the policy we follow:
- For Non-book items that we quit carrying we either 301 redirect to a similar item or to the main category for the product along with a message on the screen that the item isn't available but here is another idea.
- For book items that go out of print we leave the item up but have a pop-up telling the customer the item is out of print and we either link to another edition, format or related category.
- For annual items we have just decided to keep reusing the same sku and changing the details. Why waste all the link juice that may be gained each year by discontinuing an item that hardly changes from year to year but expires each year? For all of our past yearly items we are now 301 redirecting them to our permanent sku.
-
Thanks everyone for the responses. Perhaps leaving them up is the best way to manage it. I have to talk with my client and better understand how she works. I hate having all these pages removed, especially as I pump up the social sharing and, hopefully, add ratings and reviews. Then we'd be deleting plenty of search juice.
-
Hi Robin.
If an item is created, images of the jewelry are taken and the product is listed for sale? The question is, when the item sells doesn't that product page still have value? I would think you should keep the page so potential buyers can view products which have been made. A customer could request a similar item be made. If that is the case, keep the pages, mark the item as sold and offer links to similar products or a custom order link.
If the desire is to only sell items presently in inventory, you can 301 old links to similar pages. If there is a link to a 1 carat diamond ring, find the most similar item or category on your site and redirect the link to that page.
-
I don't think it seems wise to leave them up as "SOLD"
Don't make them dead links. Instead, create a portfolio of past work. These pieces might attract links, they might inspire sales, they will showcase craftsmanship and style.
Remove the price and any sales yada yada... and then add when the piece was made and a little more information about it.
You might not need a separate page for each one... maybe a gallery of emerald earrings or diamond pendants?... a big long page of beautiful work... Lots of visitor will scroll down that page and decide... "I want one like this but with a ruby"
-
You bring up a really interesting question. When you say dead links I assume they just lead to nowhere. Ideally you would 301 Redirect (which will pass most of its value to another page therefore keeping some of that SEO steam you have built up) to a page that allows the user to continue to search for similar or related products, keeps them on site with out scaring them away with a "File Not Found" error on their page, etc... I am not familiar with Shopify so I am not sure if its possible. Might be helpful if you were to post one of these links so that we can all take a look at it and work it out as a team.
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
-
Best way to deal with 100 product pages
It feels good to be BACK. I miss Moz. I left for a long time but happy to be back! 🙂 My client is a local HVAC company. They sell Lennox system. Lennox provides a tool that we hooked up to that allows visitors to their site to 'see' 120+ different kind of air quality, furnace and AC units. They problem is (I think its a problem) is Google and other crawl tools are seeing these 100+ pages that are not unique, helpful or related to my client. There is a little bit of cookie cutter text and images and specs and that's it. Are these pages potentially hurting my client? I can't imagine they are helping. Best way to deal with these? Thank you! Thank you! Matthew
Technical SEO | | Localseo41440 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content > Wordpress Comments Page
Hello Moz Community, I've create a campaign in Moz and received hundreds of errors, regarding "Duplicate Page Content". After some review, I've found that 99% of the errors in the "Duplicate Page Content" report are occurring due to Wordpress creating a new comment page (with the original post detail), if a comment is made on a blog post. The post comment can be displayed on the original blog post, but also viewable on a second URL, created by Wordpress. http://www.Example.com/example-post http://www.Example.com/example-post/comment-page-1 Anyone else experience this issue in Wordpress or this same type of report in Moz? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | DomainUltra0 -
Is possible to reutilize products description taken from mydomain.com in a ecommerce site?
My issue is related with cross-domain duplicate content. In the first domain (aaa.com) I have 30-40 products well described with lots of content (story, description, features, technical sheets etc). This is my primary, brand domain. I want to open an e-commerce in another domain (bbb.com) where I will sell all the products that reside in aaa.com domain. If I'm going to use the content (taken from aaa.com) for describing e-commerce products in the bbb.com domain could it be seen as duplicate content? What do you suggest? It would be a hell to rewrite all the products description and even worse, technical sheets and features/characteristics can't be written differently. Thanks in advace
Technical SEO | | polidistillerie1 -
I noticed all my SEOed sites are getting attacked constantly by viruses. I do wordpress sites. Does anyone have a good recommendation to protect my clients sites? thanks
We have tried all different kinds of security plugins but none seem to work long term.
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
How can I change the page title "two" (artigos/page/2.html) in each category ?
I have some categories and photo galleries that have more than one page (i.e.: http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos and http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos/page/2). I think that I must change the tittle and description, but I don't how. I would like to know how can I change the title of each of them without stay with duplicate title and description. Thank you! ahcAORR.jpg
Technical SEO | | otimizador20130 -
According to 1 of my PRO campaigns - I have 250+ pages with Duplicate Content - Could my empty 'tag' pages be to blame?
Like I said, my one of my moz reports is showing 250+ pages with duplicate content. should I just delete the tag pages? Is that worth my time? how do I alert SEOmoz that the changes have been made, so that they show up in my next report?
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
ECommerce site - Duplicate pages problem.
We have an eCommerce site with multiple products being displayed on a number of pages. We use rel="next" and rel="prev" and have a display ALL which I understand Google should automatically be able to find. Should we also being using a Canonical tag as well to tell google to give authority to the first page or the All Pages. Or was the use of the next and prev rel tags that we currently do adequate. We currently display 20 products per page, we were thinking of increasing this to make fewer pages but they would be better as this which would make some later product pages redundant . If we add 301 redirects on the redundant pages, does anyone know of the sort of impact this might cause to traffic and seo ?. General thoughts if anyone has similar problems welcome
Technical SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
What is the best way to deal with pages whose content changes?
My site features businesses that offers activities for kids. Each business has its own page on my site. Business pages contains a listing of different activities that organization is putting on (such as events, summer camps, drop-in activities). Some businesses only offer seasonal activities (for example, during Christmas break and summer camps). The rest of the year, the business has no activities -- the page is empty. This is creating 2 problems. It's poor user experience (which I can fix no problem) but it also is thin content and sometimes treated as duplicate content. What's the best way to deal with pages whose content can be quite extensive at certain points of the year and shallow or empty at other parts? Should I include a meta ROBOTS tag to not index when there is no content, and change the tag to index when there is content? Should I just ignore this problem? Should I remove the page completely and do a redirect? Would love to know people's thoughts.
Technical SEO | | ChatterBlock0