Categories which are frequently empty

[pbscreative]

We have a medium traffic site (www.boatshed.com) which sells used boats, the site does fairly well for popular search phrases, often ranking on first page.

A common way for people to search is by boat manufacturer, for example "sunseeker for sale" or "sunseeker 33 for sale".

To service those searches, we have search results page with URL's like: "/used-boats-for-sale/sunseeker" and "/used-boats-for-sale/sunseeker/33" (i.e. make and model).

This is fine for common makes but we have a lot of makes where we might have just one which, when sold, then leaves the page with no boats to show. It could then be just weeks till we get another one or sometimes years.

Once a manufacturer has no boats for sale, we automatically remove the link to that page from the site and from the sitemap. These pages are now being flagged as soft 404s in Webmaster tools.

Currently these pages still work and just show a "No results found" message.

I am unsure of how to deal with these pages.

Options as I see them:

1. Add a "no-index, follow" tag to the pages and continue to remove them from the sitemap. My concern is that when we do get a new boat for sale, the page will not rank again or take a long time to be re-indexed.

2. Add value to the 'no results found' page - for example, show listings for similar boats. If I do this (which makes sense from a usability perspective), would it be acceptable to leave these pages with an "index" tag?

3. 404 them - my concern being this basically says "this page has been permanently removed" when actually it will probably have content again soon.

4. 301 redirect to a page of similar boats with a message that we don't have any of that specific type at the moment.

[pbscreative]

Hi, thank you very much for your input. I think Linda meant that adding "something about how each alternate choice is similar to/different from the original boat" would be labour intensive (which is correct for 2k makes and 8m models!) but we already have logic to get "similar boats" so we'll be able to auto populate these pages with some content.

[Lumina]

I have to agree with Linda: Option 2 is your best option by far. Not only do you not continually have to manage, maintain, and remove/add these pages all the time, but they'll retain their link-juice and SEO properties.

However, I would disagree that this would require a lot of work as far as coding is concerned - even if there are thousands of pages. All you need to do is have each search page set to show set groups/images/products when results=0. Depending on how your site is coded, it could be very simple, or at least fairly easy to do.

[MonicaOConnor]

Hi there,

I often am faced with a similar issue on my site, apelectric.com. We have models that get discontinued and replaced all the time. We also have obsolete parts and out of stock inventory every so often. I think that your plan has solid strategy. The pages that still have value because they are old and have seen a good amount of traffic can be either repurposed or redirected to better suit your website. If you are ranking well on pages, don't get rid of them. Matt Cutts at Google has backed the 404 strategy when a product is completely discontinued with no hopes of returning. In this case, I don't think that is the best strategy.

What I have done in the past is re-purposed the page to offer similar products. This is great for the user, and in turn, great for your SEO. Having pages with nothing on them is never a good idea, so add relevant items like similar models or any kind of parts and maintenance if you provide those. You can also add some content about the product you don't have anymore to go with the similar products. Content is a great idea all the time.

I hope this helps!

[Linda-Vassily]

I like option 2. You could put up some information about the searched-for boat and then follow up by saying that there are none available at this time but here are some similar boats, and add your links to those boats.

You could even add something about how each alternate choice is similar to/different from the original boat, if that is something that time allows. This would be useful to the searcher and keep your pages indexed. (Of course, this depends on how many pages we are talking about--it would be labor-intensive for thousands of pages...)