Should Your Keep Out Of Stock Item Active On Your Site ?
-
If you have sold out products that will never come back in stock. Should you remove the items and urls from your sitemap and site. Or should you keep them active with a sold out image. The purpose would be for search engines will think your site is larger due the products and amount of urls you have ?
-
Also, critical to remember a person who bought the product in the past may want to view their history for some reason (see descriptions and such).
-
Before you keep these types of pages you should determine if they have any links or any traffic. If they are pulling traffic that you would not otherwise receive then you can use the page to tell the history of the item (such as an antique or other one-of-a-kind piece).
If it is a standard product such as a pair of running shoes that has been replaced by a different model you can make the page informative and explain that the item was replaced by a new model and the impovements that were made.
Both of the above showcase your helpfulness and knowledge.
However, if this page has no links and pulls no traffic then delete it and redirect it. You don't need useless pages on your site.
-
I would keep the sold out items on my site and have a "we also recommend" section below the item in the inner page to show the client that you have items similar to the one that is sold out. I wouldn't add a sold out image; instead, I would code it so if an item is sold out, then the purchase button is replaced by a sold out button/image. Depending on the products that you carry, some of your sold out items may carry weight within SEO and may show up for relevant keyword searches; you don't want to lose that.
-
It depends on the product. If the item is unique, such as a book that is now out of print, we keep it on the site with a pop-up pointing people to either a new version or the related category.
If it is a t-shirt design, we remove the item and redirect it to the category page for the item unless there is a new item that is a direct replacement.
You have to consider your audience. People will probably be grateful to know that a particular book they were looking for is out of print but they probably don't care that a specific color and cut of shirt is unavailable.
-
I agree with Virage. As long as it makes business sense and the volume of your OOS products is not more then your current products. I would not want to have 500 OOS products and 50 In stock products on a site.
Stop linking to that page from your navigation (obviously) and then if somebody does indeed navigate to your OOS product page from elsewhere on the web, then they can see it's OOS and see related products and so on. That's a much better user experience in my opinion vs a 404.
-
I do keep out of stock product pages active for the very reason you mentioned: it's more unique content for the search engines to read, and also, if someone is searching for my out of stock item, I would still want them to find my site because it is very likely we would have a similar alternative option of which they may purchase instead.
If anything, our product pages always include a ton of information, including PDFs and pictures, that just seem helpful from a consumer's POV. Even if they do not end up purchasing said product from us, they can still research it with us!
It really thus depends on the nature of your website and your products, but there is great value in retaining unique content, so if your product page is filled with useful product information, I'd say definitely keep it available for the search engines and consider linking to alternative in-stock options for your visitors to pursue as well!
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
-
How long does google takes to crawl a single site ?
lately i have been thinking , when a crawler visits an already visited site or indexed site, whats the duration of its scanning?
Algorithm Updates | | Sam09schulz0 -
Site:www Issue - Homepage of the website is not showing in Google
Hello everyone, When I have manually search site:www.blinds4uk.co.uk in google.co.uk to know about webpages status, home page of the website is not showing in google search engine result pages. Please let me know, what is the reason behind this? because website crawling and indexing is good. Many Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Kuldeep-Sharma0 -
Moving established :COM site to a .ART domain
Hi! We have an existing website that has a .com TLD with our brand name, which is completely unrelated to any of the terms we want to rank for except for the brand search of our company of course. We have an online shop and the .com site has been online for a good few years. The business activity is related to art, in fact some of our customers would search for "name of artists + art" and we appear in results. From what I have read, Google is not going to give better rankings for a .art domain name, but will the extension be counted as a potential keyword and relevancy to users searches based on example above? Does anyone have any experience with regards to this consideration? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | bjs20100 -
Site has disappeared since Panda 4 despite quality content, help!
Our site www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk has lost over 20 first page rankings since the end of May. I assume this is because of Panda 4.0. All content on the site is high quality and 100% unique, so we did not expect to get penalised. Although I read somewhere that if Google can't read particular js anymore they don't rank you as high. The site has not been blacklisted as all pages are showing in Google's index and there are no messages on webmaster tools. We have not taken part in any link schemes and have disavowed all low quality links that were pointing there just in case (after the penalty). Can anybody see anything on www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk that may have cause Panda update to affect it so negatively? Would really appreciate any help.
Algorithm Updates | | search_shop0 -
Is there a we to get Google to index our site quicker?
I have updated some pages on a website, is there a way to get Google to index the page quicker?
Algorithm Updates | | webguru20140 -
Why does my site dissappeare from the top 50?
Hellow I am having some problems with my site www.kondomanija.si. It was ranked on the first page for my main KW kondomi (in www.google.si, Slovenia) but now it is not in the top 10 pages. And this has happened before, it drops out of the top 10 pages and in a cople of moths it is back for a short time (till it drops out again). It think the site has a week link profile... Could this be the reason? Does anybody know what is going on?
Algorithm Updates | | Spletnafuzija0 -
How vital is it for a site to have a mobile site for mobile SEO?
With the exponential growth in mobile device sales and usage and an expected 980% growth in advertising next year for/on mobile devices, we at http://www.mobilewebsitegurus.com decided that it was time to help companies create great looking mobile websites that are user friendly and SEO friendly at affordable rates with tons of features built in from the start. However, when selling our design, how important is it to have a GOOD mobile site compared to a big one to rank on mobile devices? We head that Google was thinking of only showing mobile sites on mobile devices. NOT TRUE. Then we read/heard that the rankings were MUCH BETTER if you had a mobile site, but after a lot of research we found that too NOT to be true. On most sites there were NO difference. So what is the TRUTH about this and is it maybe just that it will happen, just has not happened yet - the different rankings for mobile and regular sites on mobile devices that is? ANY insight in this would be great not only for us but for the entire SEO community 🙂 Thanks. ALSO, add "Mobile SEO" to the boxes below of "Topics" since mobile SEO will grow in importance.
Algorithm Updates | | yvonneq0 -
Site Speed
I was wondering what benefits there are to investing the time and money into speeding up an eCommerce site. We are currently averaging 3.4 seconds of load time per page and I know from webmaster tools they hold the mark to be at closer to 1.5 seconds. Is it worth it to get to 1.5 seconds? Any tips for doing this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | MichealGooden0