Matt Cutts says 404 unavailable products on the 'average' ecommerce site.
-
If you're an ecommerce site owner, will you be changing how you deal with unavailable products as a result of the recent video from Matt Cutts? Will you be moving over to a 404 instead of leaving the pages live still?
For us, as more products were becoming unavailable, I had started to worry about the impact of this on the website (bad user experience, Panda issues from bounce rates, etc.).
But, having spoken to other website owners, some say it's better to leave the unavailable product pages there as this offers more value (it ranks well so attracts traffic, links to those pages, it allows you to get the product back up quickly if it unexpectedly becomes available, etc.).
I guess there's many solutions, for example, using ItemAvailability schema, that might be better than a 404 (custom or not). But then, if it's showing as unavailable on the SERPS, will anyone bother clicking on it anyway...?
Would be interested in your thoughts.
-
I see it like this, its a bad experience to find that a item is out of stock, the 404 will remove you from the index.
A site where you have a lot of products is probably not be ranking well for ever product page anyhow, I would be getting category pages to rank. and not be worried about a few lowly product pages -
Personally I prefer leaving the unavailable products (ones that will never come back) up & accessible for a set amount of time, placing a notice & link on the page to the most relevant available product or related category page, placing a canonical on the unavailable product page to that related product/category page and then after a few months redirecting the unavailable product to the related page.
-
I won't be changing what we do with out of stock items. A 404 is a bad user experience. One of our sites sells tons of products that all come in a variety of colors. 5 of them are core colors that we always have, the rest come and go. So when one of the colors that comes and goes runs out of stock and the page 404s, we 301 it to a core color that shouldn't go out of stock. And for the rare times that we're out of stock on a core color, we use out of stock messaging on the page instead of letting it 404. I was surprised he didn't mention redirects in the video.
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
-
Truncated product names
Due to the restraints of category page layout many of the products in certain categories have the product titles truncated, in some cases missing off 2-5 words depending on the product in question. The product name which displays on the category page is lifted straight from the product page itself, so not possible to do something like "product name including spec..." to place ... to indicate a bit more. I'm assuming not but just wanted to check that Google will not frown on this. Text is not being hidden it just does not render fully in the restricted space. So there is a scenario of 'bits of' text in the source not displaying on the rendered page.
Technical SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Unique page for each product variant? (Not eCommerce)
Hi Mozzers, Just looking for a little advice before I launch into a huge workload. We have landing pages for vehicle manufacturers. We then have anchor links in that page for each vehicle model that manufacturer has, with further info on the model further down the page. So we're toying with the idea of launching a unique page for each of the models rather than having them all on the same landing page. This will take an age and a minute but if it is worth it, we want to do it. Do you guys see a benefit to having unique pages for each model? Do you think it would attract more natural links? Would this help or hinder the manufacturer landing page in general? Should the manufacturer landing page be noindex so as to avoid duplicate content issues? I can see a lot of work and risk, just looking for a few opinions. PM for more info. Thanks a lot people, Jamie
Technical SEO | | SanjidaKazi0 -
What's Moz's Strategy behind their blog main categories?
I've only just noticed that the Moz' blog categories have been moved within a pull down menu. See it underneath : 'Explore Posts by Category' on any blog page. This means that the whole list of categories under that pull-down is not crawlable by bots, and therefore no link-juice flows down onto those category pages. I imagine that the main drive behind that move is to sculpt page rank so that the business/money pages or areas of the website get greater link equity as opposed to just wasting it all throwing it down to the many categories ? it'd be good to hear about more from Rand or anyone in his team as to how they came onto engineering this and why. One of the things I wonder is: with the sheer amount of content that Moz produces, is it possible to contemplate an effective technical architecture such as that? I know they do a great job at interlinking content from one post onto another, so effectively one can argue that that kind of supersedes the need for hierarchical page rank distribution via categories... but I wonder : "is it working better this way vs having crawlable blog category links on the blog section? have they performed tests" some insights or further info on this from Moz would be very welcome. thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | carralon
David0 -
Does adding subcategory pages to an commerce site limit the link juice to the product pages?
I have a client who has an online outdoor gear company. He mostly sells high end outdoor gear (like ski jackets, vests, boots, etc) at a deep discount. His store currently only resides on Ebay. So we're building him an online store from scratch. I'm trying to determine the best site architecture and wonder if we should include subcategory pages. My issue is that I think the subcategory pages might be good from a user experience, but it'll add an additional layer between the homepage and the product pages. The problem is that I think a lot of user's might be searching for the product name to see if they can find a better deal, and my client's site would be perfect for them. So I really want to rank well for the product pages, but I'm nervous that the subcategory pages will limit the link juice of the product pages. Home --> SubCategory --> Product List --> Product Detail Home --> Men's Ski Clothing --> Men's Ski Jack --> North Face Mt Everest Jacket Should I keep the SubCategory page "Men's Ski Clothing" if it helps usability? On a separate note, the SubCategory pages would have some head keyword terms, but I don't think that he could rank well for these terms anytime soon. However, they would be great pages / terms to rank for in the long term. Should this influence the decision?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Creating in-text links with ' 'target=_blank' - helping/hurting SEO!?!
Good Morning Mozzers, I have a question regarding a new linking strategy I'm trying to implement at my organization. We publish 'digital news magazines' that oftentimes have in-text links that point to external sites. More recently, the editorial department and me (SEO) conferred on some ways to reduce our bounce rate and increase time on page. One of the suggestions I offered is to add the 'target=_blank" attribute to all the links so that site visitors don't necessarily have to leave the site in order to view the link. It has, however, come to my attention that this can have some very negative effects on my SEO program, most notably, (fake or inaccurate) time(s) on-page. Is this an advisable way to create in-text links? Are there any other negative effects that I can expect from implementing such a strategy?
Technical SEO | | NiallSmith0 -
301 or a 404
Just had a discussion with a collegue about a page on our own website. We have some cases which are outdated. These pages receive some visitors but they arrive there when they search for the clients brand name, so for us they are irelevant. What's the best way to handle these kind of pages? Is a 301-redirect to the showcase overview the way to go or do we make it a 404 and include the showcase overview in this 404?
Technical SEO | | nvs.nim0 -
I have 404 errors but can't find where these links are?
The 4xx report had 0 errors, and then on the recent crawl it found over 200. They are all variations on real URLs e.g.: Real URL: http://www.bullseyeuk.com/10-up-deluxe-literature-holder.html 404 Error URL: http://www.bullseyeuk.com/10-up-deluxe-literature-holder.html �� None of them are linked to the root domain and I can't find where they are coming from. Any ideas? Thanks Jack
Technical SEO | | JackMurphy0 -
I have a WordPress site with 30 + categories and about 2k tags. I'd like to bring that number down for each taxonomy. What is the proper practice to do that?
I want to bring my categories down to about 8 or so and the tags... They're just a mess and I'd really like to bring that figure down significantly and setup a standard for usage. My thought was to remove the un-needed tags and categories and setup 301 redirects for the ones that I'm removing. Is that even necessary? Are there tools that can assist with this? What are the "gotchas" I should be aware of? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digisavvy1