What to do with non-existing products (removed products)?
-
Hello,
I'm selling unique products - only one of a kind of each product.
This means that whenever a product is sold, it is removed from display.In order not to upset Google by keep removing indexed pages I created a "sold items" page which links to all of the removed products.
The problem is (or maybe it's not a problem) is that I got to the point where I have more "sold items" then existing items (and the list keeps adding up).
What should I do with the non-existing items?
Was I correct?---------------------------------------- ADDED INFO ---------
The way the site is built is that I have main category pages and each of them is showing a large amount of products. Most of these products got indexed by Google. Each product has its own unique URL (Products do not return...)
Once a product is sold it does not come up in the product categories - I only have a general "sold items" in the footer that shows all of them (with a lot of pagination).
Since the products are rapidly changing, i thought it would upset Google to have a hundred 301 redirects in each week or two.
Since the products are very similar to one another (only different measurements / colors etc.), I thought of having a link from a sold Item to a similar available item so if Google will direct someone it will probably be to the available product.
The problem is that the sold items are now 4 times more than the number of available items... I don't think that a store should display 2008's t-shirts on 2012...
Another problem that may rise with so many products is that I'm afraid that the one type of product that is being sold much more often will take charge at the end on the entire site since I will end up with 8,000 sold items of this product, 1000 sold items of other products and 1000 available misc products... this might also start causing duplication problems as the products are quite similar.
Should I stop with the "Sold" products and use 301's?
Thanks
-
Creating 301 to non-existing products is easy (technically speaking) - are you sure that it not considered a bad thing by Google? (pages keep being removed).
Thanks again
-
301 it to the most appropriate substitute. I think it'll be easier to manage your redirect list than to juggle so many pages. You should see the impact in analytics, especially if you are tracking eCom and/or goals. Bounce rates will probably come down and time on page go up. Good luck on this.
-
Dear Chas,
You are actually correct - Google often sends people to the sold items pages and while I assumed that they will look for a similar product - they actually bounce! This is why I thought that if I will add a one way link from a sold Item to an available item Google will direct them to the available item.
About redirection - I can do that but it will be lots of redirections - products are rapidly changing.
Maybe I really should simply remove a product completely when it is sold (make it unreachable from the website - no links to it at all) and have a 301 on it and call it a day... What do you think?
-
True, if the more desirable goal is building page authority rather than selling product. "Sold out" or "out of stock" invites a bounce.
Both could be achieved with a link to a like product from the sold out page, but from a real world eCom standpoint asking product maintenance staff to insert contextual links in product copy is to invite errors or indifference - most platforms have a user friendly redirect mechanism.
-
see update on top. Thanks
-
see update on top. Thanks
-
Hi Chas,
If a product is likely to come back in the future, I'd strong suggest against redirecting the product at-all. Simply leave it to build authority whilst inactive but do display a message saying that it’s not available for purchase.
-
As SEOconsult noted, knowing a little more about the nature of your products would be helpful. I'll make an assumption that these products, while unique, have a relationship or similarity with other products you have. You could judiciously use 301 redirects (or possibly a 302 if you expect the non-existent item to eventually reappear). This is especially important if an item has acquired an external link. Eventual kill the 301 when the SEs have cleansed their index of it.
Situations like this are very common for eCom retailers - 2011 Fall Sweaters are no longer relevant (or available) - but for a good UX you'd want a searcher who found you (your sweaters) through a SERP to be redirected to a similar product (2012 Spring Sweaters).
Having a page of sold items may do you better service as a means of demonstrating credibility to potential customers as a trusted purveyor who has sold many items of XXXXXX. As for upsetting Google by removing indexed pages, quite the contrary - by removing pages and using redirects, you're telling Google come back frequently, this site is dynamic and changes often, therefore it is current and more relevant than a static, unchanging site.
-
Hi there,
Would you be able to give us an example URL (if you don't want to mention the URL in-case this page ranks for the site, perhaps you could link to a pastebin.com page containing a URL)?
Do the individual products have their own URL?
If so, I wouldn't worry about having a page for "sold items", unless of-course that's the only section of the site that mentions the said products.
Without looking at the site, I'd expect there to be categories within the site and within the categories there would be products and each product would have it's own individual page. If that's the case, there should be no need for a page listing "sold items". I'd suggest that the sold items are kept within the category that they're meant for so that they're still linked to internally; perhaps at the bottom so that the active products are at the top and the inactive are at the bottom?
If you could explain how the site works a little further (or provide a URL, I'll be able to give you a more relevant answer).
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
-
Schema for Product Categories
We have an E commerce site and we have started to implement Schema's. I've looked around quite a bit but could not find any schema's for product categories. Would there be any schema's to add besides an image, description, & occasional PDF?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
Manual Removal Request Versus Automated Request to Remove Bad Links
Our site has several hundred toxic links. We would prefer that the webmaster remove them rather than submitting a disavow file to Google. Are we better off writing web masters over and over again to get the links removed? If someone is monitoring the removal and keeps writing the web masters will this ultimately get better results than using some automated program like LinkDetox to process the requests? Or is this the type of request that will be ignored no matter what we do and how we ask? I am willing to invest in the manual labor, but only if there is some chance of a favorable outcome. Does anyone have experience with this? Basically how to get the highest compliance rate for link removal requests? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
Removing Bad Links
Hi all, I am in the process of conducting a Link Audit and I am faced with quite a lot of seemingly poor quality examples, such as; http://gotogetaways.com/tag/cunard/ http://jobhiringlocalandabroad.blogspot.com/p/job-hiring-for-cruise-liner-orchestra.html http://lumukixu.xlx.pl/p-o-cruises-aurora.php To me these should be removed \ disavowed but I am getting a little resistence from stakeholders regarding the amount of links I am seeking to rid ourselves of - all are of a similar quality to my examples above... Just so that I know that I am not being 'over eager' with my audit, I welcome your opinions Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
Removing UpperCase URLs from Indexing
This search - site:www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix gives me this result from Google: Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products. and Google tells me there is another one, which is 'very simliar'. When I click to see it I get: Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/Automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products. This is because I recently changed my program to redirect all urls with uppercase in them to lower case, as it appears that all lowercase is strongly recommended. I assume that having 2 indexed urls for the same content dilutes link juice. Can I safely remove all of my UpperCase indexed pages from Google without it affecting the indexing of the lower case urls? And if, so what is the best way -- there are thousands.0 -
Indexing non-indexed content and Google crawlers
On a news website we have a system where articles are given a publish date which is often in the future. The articles were showing up in Google before the publish date despite us not being able to find them linked from anywhere on the website. I've added a 'noindex' meta tag to articles that shouldn't be live until a future date. When the date comes for them to appear on the website, the noindex disappears. Is anyone aware of any issues doing this - say Google crawls a page that is noindex, then 2 hours later it finds out it should now be indexed? Should it still appear in Google search, News etc. as normal, as a new page? Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Is it worth re-doing SEO for all existent products
We have a website and when we started, we had no clue about SEO, nor did we really understand the full extent of CRO amongst other things. We have slowly learnt that there are many changes that need to happen to our site; however...do we need to re SEO all the content that is already on the website or can we purely start a fresh with the new products we feed through? The website is: www.onlineforequine.co.uk if you need to take a look at the kind of platform we are working with.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlineforequine0 -
Magento: URLs for Products in Multiple Categories
I am working in Magento to build out a large e-commerce site with several thousand products. It's a great platform, but I have run into the issue of what it does to URLs when you put a product into multiple categories. Basically, "a book" in two categories would make two URLs for one product: 1) /books/a-book 2) author-name/a-book So, I need to come up with a solution for this. It seems I have two options: Found this from a Magento SEO article: 'Magento gives you the ability to add the name of categories to path for product URL's. Because Magento doesn't support this functionality very well - it creates duplicate content issues - it is a very good idea to disable this. To do this, go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set "Use categories path for product URL's to "no".' This would solve the issues and be a quick fix, but I think it's a double edged sword, because then we lose the SEO value of our well named categories being in the URL. Use Canonical tags. To be fair, I'm not even sure this is possible. Even though it is creating different URLs and, thus, poses a risk of "duplicate content" being crawled, there really is only one page on the admin side. So, I can't go to all of the "duplicate" pages and put a canonical tag, because those duplicate pages don't really exist on the back-end. Does that make sense? After typing this out, it seems like the best thing to do probably will be to just turn off categories in the URL from the admin side. However, I'd still love any input from the community on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
Best website structure for product benefits and features.
I'm in disagreement with my partner over how best to represent our products' benefits and features on the homepage of our website. I'm interested in this from primarily a SEO perspective but it obviously has an impact on conversions as well. I believe that a homepage shouldn't contain too much information so as not to overwhelm the user, a brief sentence or two about each benefit with a link to another page with in depth info about the related feature. Each of these inner pages would be optimized and contain much more content that you could put on the homepage example below. Each Please see wireframe A He believes in more information on the homepage. There is more content to index which he believes is important for the homepage. Also, by using tabs most of the content is hidden from initial view so its doesn't clutter the page and the user doesn't have to leave the page to decide whether he is interested in the software. Please see wireframe B below. I'd really love to hear from other Moz'ers which they would choose and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Riona0