Ecommerce SEO - Indexed product pages are returning 404's due to product database removal. HELP!
-
Hi all,
I recently took over an e-commerce start-up project from one of my co-workers (who left the job last week). This previous project manager had uploaded ~2000 products without setting up a robot.txt file, and as a result, all of the product pages were indexed by Google (verified via Google Webmaster Tool).
The problem came about when he deleted the entire product database from our hosting service, godaddy and performed a fresh install of Prestashop on our hosting plan. All of the created product pages are now gone, and I'm left with ~2000 broken URL's returning 404's. Currently, the site does not have any products uploaded. From my knowledge, I have to either:
- canonicalize the broken URL's to the new corresponding product pages,
or
- request Google to remove the broken URL's (I believe this is only a temporary solution, for Google honors URL removal request for 90 days)
What is the best way to approach this situation? If I setup a canonicalization, would I have to recreate the deleted pages (to match the URL address) and have those pages redirect to the new product pages (canonicalization)?
Alex
-
Everett,
You're right on the money. I don't think you could have summarized my problem any better. I will take Dana's and your advice and let them sit "indexed" for a while and serve a 404. According to GWT's Index Status, the product pages were indexed about a month ago, so I guess it won't hurt to wait a few more weeks until those pages dropped out of Google's index naturally, especially since the site development won't be done for another 6~7 weeks.
Thanks a bunch for all of your insights
-
Right on Everett. I agree 100%
-
I want to make sure everyone, including myself, understands you Alex. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying that the website is totally new (a start-up) and nothing (at least nothing owned by the company you're with) has ever been on that domain name. While building the site the previous guy accidentally allowed the development version of the site to be indexed, and/or allowed product pages that you don't want on the site at all to be indexed. Since it is a brand new site those "old" pages that were deleted didn't have any external links, and didn't have any traffic from Google or elsewhere outside of the company.
IF that is the case, then you can probably just let those pages stay as 404s. Eventually, since nobody is linking to them, they will drop out of the index on their own.
I wouldn't use the URL removal tool in this case. For one thing, it is a dangerous tool and if you don't have experience with this sort of thing it could do more harm than good. It should only take a few weeks for those URLs that were briefly live and indexed to go away if you are serving a 404 or 410 http header response code on those URLs.
I hope this helps. Please let us know if we have misinterpreted your problem.
-
Understood Alex. Yes, of course you would have to rebuild the pages first before you can 301, but it sounds like you are planning on rebuilding them (otherwise you wouldn't be able to use canonical tags either, because there wouldn't be a page to put them on).
I wouldn't just give up and ask Google to remove all of the old URLs. I agree with what Mike has to say about that below. A 302 is a good option if you are worried about the 404s sitting in the index while you are rebuilding your product pages. If you are still on the same platform (it sounds like that didn't change), I would suggest rebuilding as many of the old URLs as you can (if they were good SEO-friendly URLs). That way you could bypass the 301 redirect. If you want to create your pages so that product options are rolled in and separate colors of things no longer need separate pages, you can then choose whether to 301 redirect those old URLs or simply let them 404.
404s aren't necessarily always a bad thing. Regarding the 2,000 of them you have now, if some of those pages just need to go away, you can let them 404 and they will eventually drop out of Google's index. You aren't required to manually submit them via GWT in order for them to be removed.
-
Hi Mike,
Thanks for weighing in. Recreating all of the old pages seems like a pain in the butt... Besides, the site never launched, so I had no traffic at all. Considering there was no traffic at all to these pages, do you think it's a good idea to go through the URL removal from GWT and purge the broken links completely from Google's index?
- Alex
-
Hi Dana,
Thank you for your advice. I'm new at SEO, so I may be wrong but...
Mapping out the old/new URLs on a spreadsheet and setting up a 301 redirect to the new URLs is not a plausible option in my opinion, mainly because the new URLs literally do not exist (I have not created ANY product pages). According to your suggestion, I would have to create new product pages and do a 301 redirect from the broekn URLs to the newly created pages? Not quite sure if I'm understanding you correctly...
In addition, the previous project manager wasn't SEO-savvy (l'm not either... sigh..), so he didn't know that creating separate pages for a product with multiple attributes (such as flavor and size) would result in major duplicate content issues.
The site is going through some major design/layout overhaul, and I intend to come up with a SEO strategy before creating any categories or products.
Thus...
Do you think it's better to submit a URL removal request on GWT and get rid of the indexed URL's completely? I just re-read Google's policy on URL removal, and it states that as long as I have a 4xx (404 or 410, I'm assuming..) returned for the URLs, Google will honor the removal request.
- Alex
-
Rel Canonical is not quite the right thing for this sort of issue.
If you're worried about the 404s sitting around too long and losing traffic for the moment, you can 302 everything to a landing page, category page, or homepage while you work on setting everything else up. You have two choices at this point.... 1) recreate all of the old pages and old URLs then remove the 302s, or 2) Add new products and new URLs, then as Dana said you'll need to map out all your new product URLs and old URLs to determine what old URL should be 301 redirected where. Then set up your necessary 301s and test that they all work.
-
Hi Alex, I am sorry to hear about this. What a mess, no? If it were me, I wouldn't rely solely on the canonical tag. I would also create a spreadsheet and map all the old URLs to the new URLs and set up 301 redirects from the old to the new. 2,000 isn't too bad. You can probably knock them out in 2-3 days...but be sure to test all of the 301s and make sure they are performing the way you expect them to. Hope that helps a little!
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
-
Need some help understanding SEO - Please help before I lose [pull out] all my hair
I'm new to SEO, and am stubbornly trying to educate myself. I have a telescope shop in Canada, it's a small business that we run on the side. We're driving lots of traffic through FB and our outreach programs but I really want to increase our presence on search. We released a new website back in January and it killed some of our rankings. We're working our way back with a very specific set of efforts on regular SEO: Metadata and titles, although it seems that's not super relevant Building high quality backlinks and eliminating any spammy backlinks Rewriting product listings so that they are original content though I'm not sure how important this is in e-commerce Writing high quality articles and blog posts Working relevant keywords into our product pages and titles I understand that good SEO is about pushing on all the levers, and trying to make sure that your site is as valuable to the end user as possible. We're making some good progress, but I'm puzzled by the #1 shop in Canada. They don't put any apparent effort into SEO and they still rank #1 on every key product we compete with them on. I've worked with two separate, highly ranked and regarded SEO firms on this and neither has been able to tell my why this other site ranks so highly. Here's a specific example on a popular product that we both sell, the Celestron NexStar 8SE. Here’s the link to Telescope Canada’s page for their Celestron 8SE: https://telescopescanada.ca/products/celestron-nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope-11069 Here’s a link to the Celestron 8SE page from the manufacturer website: https://www.celestron.com/products/nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope Telescopes Canada has just copied and pasted. There is no original content aside from adding the shipping and return policy to the tab, and having some options for selecting accessories on the page. Here is our page: https://all-startelescope.com/products/celestron-nexstar-8se We have higher page authority, higher domain authority, and they keyword analyzer in moz says that our page is higher quality than the Telescopes Canada page. I can’t find a single metric on any tool (ubbersuggest, Moz, ahrefs, semrush) that says Telescopes Canada is a better site, or has a better NexStar 8SE product page. But they keep ranking ahead of us, and right at the top of google search. Our titles are good, our metadata is good (but I don’t think that’s been a serious ranking factor for about ten years). Our text is original, it’s relevant, we have healthy internal links to the page. According to Moz's page ranker it's 20 points higher than Telescope Canada's page. We have invensted in some excellent blog content, we’re adding new products to the website so that we rank for more keywords. All of those things are helping, but I fundamentally don’t understand why Telescopes Canada is #1 almost across the board on every key product in our market. There is something that I’m not seeing here. Can you see any metric, any tool in your toolbox that indicates why they rank at the top, or even higher than we do for in these search terms specific to that product: Celestron NexStar 8SE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nkennett
NexStar 8SE
Celestron NexStar 8SE Canada
NexStar 8SE Canada I have a feeling it's something technical that I'm missing, but I'm not sure how obvious it is with two 'professional' firms not finding it. I'd really appreciate any help or insight that you can offer.0 -
How do we decide which pages to index/de-index? Help for a 250k page site
At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally. Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles). Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
Shopify Product Variants vs Separate Product Pages
Let's say I have 10 different models of hats, and each hat has 5 colors. I have two routes I could take: a) Make 50 separate product pages Pros: -Better usability for customer because they can shop for just masks of a specific color. We can sort our collections to only show our red hats. -Help SEO with specific kw title pages (red boston bruins hat vs boston bruins hat). Cons: -Duplicate Content: Hat model in one color will have almost identical description as the same hat in a different color (from a usability and consistency standpoint, we'd want to leave descriptions the same for identical products, switching out only the color) b) Have 10 products listed, each with 5 color variants Pros: -More elegant and organized -NO duplicate Content Cons: -Losing out on color specific search terms -Customer might look at our 'red hats' collection, but shopify will only show the 'default' image of the hat, which could be another color. That's not ideal for usability/conversions. Not sure which route to take. I'm sure other vendors must have faced this issue before. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore0 -
Ecommerce: remove duplicate product pages or use rel=canonical
Say we have a white-widget that is in our white widget collection and also in our wedding widget collection. Currently, we have 3 different URLs for that product (white-widgets/white-widget and wedding-widgets/white-widget and all-widgets/white-widget).We are automatically generating a rel=canonical tag for those individual collection product pages that canonical the original product page (/all-widgets/white-widget). This guide says that is the structure Zappos uses and says "There is an elegance to this approach. However, I would re-visit it today in light of changes in the SEO world."
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore
I noticed that Zappos, and many other shops now actually just link back to the parent product page (e.g. If I am in wedding widget section and click on the widget, I go to all-products/white-widget instead of wedding-widgets/white-widget).So my question is:Should we even have these individual product URLs or just get rid of them altogether? My original thought was that it would help SEO for search term "white wedding widget" to have a product URL wedding-widget/white-widget but we won't even be taking advantage of that by using rel=canonical anyway.0 -
Will pages irrelevant to a site's core content dilute SEO value of core pages?
We have a website with around 40 product pages. We also have around 300 pages with individual ingredients used for the products and on top of that we have some 400 pages of individual retailers which stock the products. Ingredient pages have same basic short info about the ingredients and the retail pages just have the retailer name, adress and content details. Question is, should I add noindex to all the ingredient and or retailer pages so that the focus is entirely on the product pages? Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia0 -
Starting Over with a new site - Do's and Don'ts?
After six months, we've decided to start over with a new website. Here's what I'm thinking. Please offer any constructive Do's or Don'ts if you see that I'm about to make a mistake. Our original site,(call it mysite.com ) we have come to the conclusion, is never going to make a come back on Google. It seems to us a better investment to start over, then to to simply keep hoping. Quite honestly, we're freakin' tired of trying to fix this. We don't want to screw with it any more. We are creative people, and would much rather be building a new race car rather than trying to overhaul the engine in the old one. We have the matching .net domain, mysite.net, which has been aged about 6 years with some fairly general content on a single page. There are zero links to mysite.net, and it was really only used by us for FTP traffic -- nothing in the SERPS for mysite.net. Mysite.NET will be a complete redesign. All content and images will be totally redone. Content will be new, excellent writing, unique, and targeted. Although the subject matter will be similar to mysite.COM, the content, descriptions, keywords, images -- all will be brand spankin' new. We will have a clean slate to begin the long painful link building process.We will put in the time, and bite the bullet until mysite.NET rules Google once again. We'll change the URL in all of our Adwords campaigns mysite.net. My questions are: 1. Mysite.com still gets some ok traffic from Bing. Can I leave mysite.com substantially intact, or does it need to go? 2. If I have "bad links" pointing to mysite.com/123.html what would happen if I 301 that page to mysite.NET/abc.html ? Does the "bad link juice" get passed on to the clean site? It would be a better experience for users who know our URL if they could be redirected to the new site. 3. Should we put Mysite.net on a different server in a different clean IP block? Or doesn't matter? We're willing to spend for the new server if it would help 4. What have I forgotten? Cheers, all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarrenX0 -
I can't help but think something is wrong with my SEO
So we re-launched our site about a month ago, and ever since we've seen a dramatic drop in search results (probably due to some errors that were made) when changing servers and permalink structure. But, I can't help but think something else is at play here. When we write something, I can check 24 hours later, and if I copy the Title verbatim, but we don't always show up in SERPs. In fact, I looked at a post today, and the meta description showing is not the same, but when I check the source code, it's right. What shows up in Google: http://d.pr/i/jGJg What's actually in the source code: http://d.pr/i/p4s8 Why is this happening? Website is The Tech Block
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0 -
Member request pages, indexed or no indexed?
We run a service website and basically users of the site post their request to get certain items fixed/serviced. Through Google Analytics we have found that we got lots of traffic to these request pages from people searching for those particular items. E.g. A member's request page: "Cost to fix large Victorian oven" has got many visits from searchers searching for "large Victorian oven". The traffic to these pages is about 40% of our Google organic traffic but didn't covert to more users/requests well and has roughly 67% bounce rate. So my question is: should we keep these pages indexed and if yes what can we do to improve the conversion rate/reduce bounce rate? Many thanks guys. David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0