404 page for webshop vs 302 redirect
-
Hi everybody
Im the owner of a webshop and we have implemented that products that are not instock are disabled from the shop. My problem is that i have a lot of 404 pages, that right now get redirected to the front page, when the item are not instock. This is because it would hurt the conversion rate if they got a standard 404 page. Customers dont know what a 404 and would click back and choose another competitor. Its really hard to find out what are the best solution and what are not a downrank at google. This has been running like this for 2 years and cant see any negative in the solution regarding seo and so on,
What are your thoughts?
Christian Hansen
Denmark
-
in that situation, my recommendation would be a 302 to the next highest related page in the chain (such as the sub-category page or the category page above it), with the custom "we're sorry but that product is out of stock" message.
If a product doesn't come back in stock over a relatively defined length of time (30 days, 60 days), etc., you should have the policy where the 302 becomes a 301 to that same page, with the same message. It would mean that if a product DOES come back in stock after that, you'd cause some confusion from an SEO algorithm perspective, but it's the right thing to do.
-
Thx all of you. The problem is though that we never know if we can get the products again thats why it becomes to heavy load to say to the customer that we will contact the person when the product gets in stock again.
-
Oh and 1 additional concept - as in Stephanie's article, the 3rd alternative is keeping the page, informing them its out of stock, and showing them other similar products, right on that page that you may not normally include when something is in stock. Couple that with the "notify me when its in stock" form on the page as well, and that could very well be the best solution.
-
Christian, definitely read the article Keri linked to. Note in the article the section on "Where should you 301 redirect your pages to?"
Whether you 301 them to one of the suggested "most relevant" pages, or 302 them to a custom dynamically generated close matching page higher up in the hierarchy, it's the best practice. 301 would be for products you aren't going to carry. 302s would be for out of stock, as long as the 302 generates a custom message at the top of that page they're pointing to that informs them you're out of stock.
A final consideration would be to create a form below that "sorry, out of stock" message, that invites visitors to be notified by email when a product is back in stock. I've seen that extra functionality save a lot of otherwise lost business.
-
Stephanie Chang wrote a great post about this on the blog a few weeks back at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content
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
-
302 Redirect Question
After running a site crawl. I found two 302 redirects. The two redirects go from: site.com to www.site.com & site.com/products to www.site.com/products How do I fix the 302 redirect and change it to a 301 redirect? I have no clue where to start. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Ryan_1320 -
How to get google to forget my old but still working page and list my new fully optimized page for a keyword?
Hi There! (i am beginner in seo) I have dynamic and static pages on our site. I created a static page for a specific keyword. Fully optimized it, (h1, alt, metas, etc.....maybe too optimized). My problem is that this page is alive for weeks, checked it in GWT and it is in robots.txt, google sees it, and indexed it. BUT whenewer i do a search for that keyword, we still appear with the dynamically created link in the google listings. How could i "redirect" google, if sy make a search for that keyword than shows our optimized page? Is there a tool for that? I cant delete the dynamic page... Any ideas? Thx Andrew
Technical SEO | | Neckermann0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Dealing with 404 pages
I built a blog on my root domain while I worked on another part of the site at .....co.uk/alpha I was really careful not to have any links go to alpha - but it seems google found and indexed it. The problem is that part of alpha was a copy of the blog - so now soon we have a lot of duplicate content. The /alpha part is now ready to be taken over to the root domain, the initial plan was to then delete /alpha. But now that its indexed I'm worried that Ill have all these 404 pages. I'm not sure what to do.. I know I can just do a 301 redirect for all those pages to go to the other ones in case a link comes on but I need to delete those pages as the server is already very slow. Or does a 301 redirect mean that I don't need those pages anymore? Will those pages still get indexed by google as separate pages? Please assist.
Technical SEO | | borderbound0 -
Any issues with lots of pages issuing 301 redirects?
Hi all, I'm working on a site redesign and it is possible the new site could issue a lot of 301 redirects as we may migrate from one forum solution to another. Is there any issue with crawlers getting a lot of 301 redirects from a site? Thanks Nick
Technical SEO | | nickswan0 -
Permanent 301 redirects vs canonical urls?
Im moving a website that was .php to wordpress with a few static HTML pages. Which is better use permanent 301 redirects and delte the old pages, leave the old pages and use canonical urls and 301 redirects or something else?
Technical SEO | | senith0 -
Too many on page links for WP blog page
Hello, I have set my WP blog to a page so new posts go to that page making it the blog. On a SEOmoz campaign crawl, it says there are too many links on one page, so does this mean that as I am posting my blog posts to this page, the search engines are seeing the page as one page with links instead of the blog posts? I worry that if I continue to add more posts (which obviously I want to) the links will increase more and more, meaning that they will be discounted due to too many links. What can I do to rectify this? Many thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | mozUser14692366292850