Shall I 301 a Url that has a discontinued product or shall we remove from Googles index
-
My web site sells shoes. These items go out of fashion and are replaced. Shall I 301 a Url that has a discontinued product or shall we remove from Googles index using webmaster tools.
I seem to have a massive 301 list that carries on growing and Im concerned that to carry on doing 301s is not the right way.
-
Hi BruceA
Thanks for the comment, yes I 301 with all the you mention in mind, I was just worried that one could actually create to many 301s and therefor be penalized in some way.
-
Cross Selling products, have you thought or tried to add links to similar replacement products from the original product?
This style is now discontinued, here are some alternatives.... If the customer took the trouble to find and click onto your site, try and keep them on it and not to bounce straight back out.
Bruce
-
I see where both eyepaq and Highland are coming from. I personally hate landing on products that are no longer available and would prefer to land on a category giving me options,so that's why I have been implementing 301s. It just dawned on me that perhaps I may have missed a change in the goal posts from our trusted Google and redirecting may flag my site up. I did recently get a message in G webmaster tools about my redirects should be more relevant because of mobile use as a bad re direct would confuse the mobile shopper. I checked out the ones in question and i was happy that they were ok but it did make me think about the mobile shopper and weather actually it would be better to take the URL from the index altogether. Mobiles do seem to be used to surf my site more and more.
Cheers Guys
-
Hi,
It make sense to 301 redirect the old products to keep current Page Rank - PR won't be lost and it will be transferred to another similar page (assuming you will link to a similar page). if you remove the page - you will lose any PR that that particular page is holding. So I would definitely implement the 301 redirects and won’t cut down those pages that might have some incoming links, someone might have those in bookmarks and so on.
There is no limit as far as the overall number of 301 redirects per site. You can have millions if you want to. There is only a limit to the 301 chains.
Here is a video about this from long ago - but still very valid today - from Mat Cutts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA
Hope it helps.
Cheers !
-
Never underestimate the power of legacy content. Yes, those shoes are no longer for sale but what if someone wants to consign a pair and needs details? Google might favor your site and send traffic your way. Mark it out of stock, add some products they might enjoy instead and move on. I've noticed that Amazon, Newegg, etc. don't delete their old URLs. Stuff I bought years ago is still out there.
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
-
Google Crawl Stats
Hi all Wondering if anyone could help me out here. I am seeing massive variations in WMT of google crawl stats on a site I run. Just wondering if this is normal (see attached image). The site is an eccommerce site and gets a handful of new products added every couple of weeks. The total no of products is about 220k so this is only a very small %. I notice in WMT I have an amber warning under Server connectivity. About 10 days back I had warnings under DNS, Server and Robots. This was due to bad server performance. I have since moved to a new server and the other two warnings have gone back to green. I expect the Server connectivity one to update any day now. Ive included the graph for this incase it is relevant here. Many thanks for assistance. Carl crawlstats.png connect.png
Reporting & Analytics | | daedriccarl0 -
Google Ad referral
I was wondering if someone could decode the jumble of a referral - this is supposedly the referal that led to a click through to my site via a product listing ad. I am trying to figure out how www.nextag.com comes in to the picture as we do not have refurbexperts even listed there? Thanks to anyone who tries/does work it out. http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=CGXud6DmDU_qeL5THygHpuICwCaTZwMYD_Nvvv0bEwMS50wEIBhAEIOn5-gEoBVCl7P7f-v____8BYMnu8omYpPQSoAHAhIv9A8gBB8gDG6oEJ0_QwcNc5zNun_d7S5KNcMT6uPjjH_mMDkKFFgBCQ6aKICRPJVVa7MAFBYgGAaAGJoAHqPv0ApAHAeASupqdo-ypit0m&ohost=www.google.com&cid=5GhZEzUCSC6x9n2wxOdz3-mrAfSUkvHKPN3wD5yLInnlNil_&sig=AOD64_1D1z1JPYbFP0UnUglJVOfvd25RfA&adurl=http://refurbexperts.com/product/527/HP-LaserJet-P2015-Laser-Printer-RECONDITIONED%3Futm_source%3Dproductlistingads%26utm_medium%3Dadwords%26utm_campaign%3Dadwords&ctype=5&nb=0&res_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nextag.com%2Fhp-p2015-laserjet%2Fproducts-html%3Fnxtg%3D116d0a1c0504-9FFEB16DE52A7E2A&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nextag.com%2Fgoto.jsp%3Fp%3D3652%26search%3Dhp%2520p2015%2520laserjet%26t%3Dag%253D1384181795%26crid%3D48271786%26gg_aid%3D20169721025%26gg_site%3D%26gclid%3DCjgKEAjwzIucBRDzjIz9qMOB3TASJABBIwL1LHK7GcAPS6yHGpd9Kq3wsZrcPORAWD8QCWivr4W75PD_BwE&nm=11&nx=43&ny=12&is=700x181&clkt=187
Reporting & Analytics | | henya0 -
Showing significant visit in google analytics
Hello Everyone, I was checking GA account of my site and I have found there are few keywords have significant number of visits in GA. These keywords not ranking even in hundred(google SERPs).I am not understanding from where these visitors coming .Please help me out. I am attaching screenshot of those keyword.Last but not least when i check source of these keywords source are google. Thanks aScZ8WT.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Alick3000 -
Google traffic plummeted on Sunday - what can I do?
On Sunday, my google traffic plummeted. I was getting 320 hits a day from Google on my best days - my site is just about to turn 3 months old so I was thrilled with that. On Sunday it was 110 and I think it is getting worse. Edit: Yep, yesterday was 65. Google Webmasters shows the drop today. One day, my impressions were 5,500 and the next just 1,000. Yikes. My traffic is so depressing now after so much hard work. Is this Google Panda? What can I do? I have no idea why this happened. I am getting several quality backlinks a week, sometimes a day.
Reporting & Analytics | | 2bloggers0 -
Implications of Google discontinuing Website Optimizer
Hi Guys, As most of you probably know, Google is discontinuing Website Optimizer and introducing Experiments within Google Analytics. However, doesn't this mean that now, every site you want to run an experiment for has to be using Google Analytics? This is possibly one of the motivations for them making the change I guess? I also find it inconvenient that every 'experiment' now has to be based on improving a pre-defined goal in Google Analytics. This means that for a lot of situations we'll be creating goals just for the experiment and the clients actual goal conversions will appear quite inflated. I guess we'll just have to filter the new 'goals' out from the actual goals.
Reporting & Analytics | | David_ODonnell1 -
How to Track Google Local Places in Google Analytics?
I have read many articles on how to track google local places through google analytics. Each article I have read show a different way of setting up google analytics and using tags in google local places. Wondering if anyone as up to date information on this and what would be the best practice to track data from google local lisitngs in google analytics Thanks Arthur
Reporting & Analytics | | VivaArturo0 -
My own brand searches stopped appearing in google
Hi everyone, I've never asked a question here before, so go easy on me 🙂 I've noticed recently that my site is not showing up for my own brand searches anymore, and that my organic google results are way down. For example, it used to be if you would search for "grouvee kings quest 6" you would either see http://www.grouvee.com/news/kings-quest-6-retro-rerun-playthrough-part-1/63/ or http://www.grouvee.com/games/kings-quest-vi-heir-today-gone-tomorrow/69/ show up first in google. Now they're nowhere to be found. Here's another example. If you would search for "grouvee mass effect 3" you'd either see http://www.grouvee.com/games/mass-effect-3/75/ or http://www.grouvee.com/news/mass-effect-3-lets-take-the-earth-back/136/ show up first in google. Once again, nowhere to be found. I could go on with several other examples, but I don't really know what I've done. I 301 redirected 2 pages a few weeks ago because I added a /reviews/ structure to my site and needed to move a couple of pages that used to be under /news/ over to the new section, but those shouldn't have had anything to do with the pages I referenced above. I haven't done any link building really. I submit some of my articles occasionally to places like reddit or n4g, but that's about it. Anyone have any tips or things I should be looking at?
Reporting & Analytics | | petecorsaro0 -
How do shortened links show up in Google Analytics?
Hey, How do shortened links show up in GA? So if I tweet about something and use bitly, does twitter get the referral? I am thinking not. I have never seen bitly show up as a referrer, but we gets lots of clicks from those links. Hmmmm. Anyone? E
Reporting & Analytics | | ErinTM0