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Hey,

Agree with the other replies but wanted to mention that changing your article title may have an adverse affect on the ranking performance of your content, so be careful and do some solid research before making a change.

Thanks!

Salience

Hey,

If a product is out-of-stock temporarily, best practice is to link to alternative products, for example:

• Newer models or versions.
• Similar products from other brands.
• Other products in the same category that match in quality and price.
• The same product in different colours.

This provides a good service to customers and helps search engines find and understand related pages easier.

If a product is out-of-stock permanently there are three main options.

1: Product returns a 410 (or 404) Not Found status.
Google understands 410 and 404 Not Found pages are inevitable, but the problem with creating too many of them is it reduces the time search engine crawlers will spend visiting the pages that actually should rank. If this option is implemented, ideally there should be signposts to related products on the Not Found page.

2. 301 permanently redirect old product to existing product (e.g. newer version or close alternative).
A dynamically generated message should clearly display on the page e.g. “Product X is no longer available. This is a similar product/the replacement product.”

This option is recommended if redirect chains can be minimised, e.g. if product turnover is high the following could happen in a short timeframe:

1. Product 1 no longer exists and gets 301 redirected to Product 2.
2. Product 2 no longer exists and gets 301 redirected to Product 3.
3. Now a redirect chain exists: Product 1 redirects to Product 2 which then redirects to Product 3. Product 1 would need to be updated to redirect to Product 3, without the intermediate redirect to Product 2.

3. 301 permanently redirect old product to parent category. A dynamically generated message should clearly display on the page e.g. “Product X is no longer available. Please see similar products below.”

As categories are likely to change less often than products, this is potentially easier to implement than option 2.

Hey,

We absolutely recommend externally linking to local relevant attractions.

This is great from a user point of view as you are endorsing local events/services/attractions which is more likely to encourage customers to stay in that area and hopefully your hotel.

Additionally, you are giving Google clear signals that your hotel website is relevant to that local area because of the geo citations and building of local authority.

Hope this helps!

Salience

Hey,

We crawled the site just fine with Screaming Frog. Perhaps this is a Moz issue?

Looks like they are well aware of it though.

Thanks!

A client previously had their most important landing page at domain.com/example.htm

They carried out the sort of link building that was commonplace a few years back (exact match anchors, paid blog links etc) targeting this URL, but they also got a bunch of legitimate decent quality links here. I believe they may have had a number of issues when link quality algo updates were rolled out, so rather than try and get links removed and go through the disavow process they instead decided to abandon this URL, let it 404 and start afresh at domain.com/example.html - updating all internal navigation, XML sitemaps etc.

So fast forward to today. What is the best practice for this URL these days do we think? Is it now possible to 301 domain.com/example.htm > domain.com/example.html and recover whatever value may be left here? The argument for not doing so may be that you could pass over the negative metrics associated with the old URL, but would this not be handled by the real-time penguin update and the poor links just devalued rather than actually harming? And could this just be tested - i.e. add in the 301, monitor the impact and if things don't go the way we'd want then just remove the 301 again?

Would be keen to get a few opinions on this.

TIA

Thanks for the response Gregory, at the moment I am testing setting up a duplicate site on the country specific domain which all local visitors to the .com are redirected too. That site then has the meta no index, follow tag with hreflang tags and content languages tags for the country implemented, with the default tags for other languages pointing to the .com version. Worth a shot I guess.

A client cannot appear in any search engines in one given country but they are ok in rest of the world. Has anybody had any experience blocking a site from appearing in just google.de, bing.de and yahoo.de for example?

Hey,

We absolutely recommend externally linking to local relevant attractions.

This is great from a user point of view as you are endorsing local events/services/attractions which is more likely to encourage customers to stay in that area and hopefully your hotel.

Additionally, you are giving Google clear signals that your hotel website is relevant to that local area because of the geo citations and building of local authority.

Hope this helps!

Salience

Hey,

Agree with the other replies but wanted to mention that changing your article title may have an adverse affect on the ranking performance of your content, so be careful and do some solid research before making a change.

Thanks!

Salience