Hi Sigurd,

A 503 seems like an odd choice in this circumstance - is this something that the eCommerce software dictates, or are there options for this?

A 503 is service unavailable and isn't something I would expect to see on a page that has expired. There are a number of alternatives depending on the product & niche. For Google to be seeing thousands of 503's might make it look like the site is having problems.

If a page really must go, then it should be a 404 / 410, or a 301 to a close alternative, but not a 503.

Are there pointers that show these are causing issues with the site's SERP's?

-Andy

Another vote for noindexing tags.

They serve very little (no real) benefit for SEO and cause more headaches than anything else. I never really want to see tags indexing and competing with primary internal pages that actually carry the information I want people to find.

Use them, but just don't index them.

-Andy

Hi,

Without knowing a little more detail, it's hard to say with 100% certainty, but I can't see why the sitemap should have every iteration of a product in there. These pages (pages that are produced due to an attribute change) should rel=canonical back to the main product page anyway and this will handle duplication.

And unless you many many thousands of products in each sitemap, then you wouldn't want to be splitting them up like this, although you can rationalize these somewhat depending on the products and site.

Just remember that the sitemap is only there as an aid to helping Google crawl and there is no actual SEO benefit to this. It is whatever is going to make the most sense to the site and to Google.

-Andy

Edit: Just Tweeted this out as well to see if others wish to chime in

I see this daily - the struggle is real!

You have one department arguing that SEO and content is where the good money is spent, and then the UX and designers screaming at them to please change the placement of the CTA button.

The fact of the matter is, both are equally important and I tend to find the best way to resolve these conflicts, is to A/B test and let the numbers speak for themselves. At that point, someone has to concede and should do so gracefully, because they should all be focusing on what is best for the company.

Failing all else, a boxing ring and last man standing gets the budget.

-Andy

Just a little more info from Google here as well on how Pagerank Sculpting no longer works...

http://www.thesempost.com/google-pagerank-sculpting-still-doesnt-work/

Hi Dave,

I'm struggling to understand your scenario. So are you looking to have all searches result in landing on pages within one domain, or will they remain on their respective domains?

-Andy

I honestly wouldn't worry Becky. The page looks fine, the links look fine and it is certainly not what you would call spammy,

Link crafting was a 'thing' a number of years ago, but today Google pretty much ignores this, as has been shown many times in testing.

However, you can benefit from internal links, but that is a different discussion. Read this if you are interested.

If you are interested, there is a round-table discussion on eCommerce SEO hosted by SEMrush on Thursday and that could be useful to you? Myself and 2 others will be talking on a number of issues.

-Andy

Confirmation from Google here to limit the links on a page to 3000

https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/news/google-webmaster-hangout-notes-friday-8th-july-2016/

I would consider that to be a lot though

-Andy

Hi Rich,

Don't nofollow for the sake of it. If a link is paid for, then yes, you should nofollow this, but that is probably one of the very few occasions i would suggest you do it.

Perhaps if you have written a blog post and then were asked to inject a link into it, then I would be tempted to nofollow that, but I wouldn't do it to try and retain link juice - that isn't really a tactic these days.

Google wants to see you link to sites externally, as long as it is called for - this will help show your authority as well.

-Andy