Old / passed productpages
-
Hi, what shall i do with the old / passed productpages? The situation right now is, that all product url's are being saved wich cost me a lot of duplicate content and lot's of url's being indexed and crawled and no use to the website at all.
As there are affiliate links to those passed url's i want to give them a 301 to the category page wicht fitst best for a time of period?
Do you think that's the best solution? And what time of period shall ik give those 301 redirects?
Thnx and grtz, Leonie
-
Well i decided to give old product pages a 301 redirect, as long there is traffic on the url's, this wil be the best solution for this site. To leave the page up with a canonical, will create a messy site at the end. Thanx for all your replies!
Grtz, Leonie
-
Hi Erica,
yes they have, and they are shutting of those links, but still encounter 404's from the affiliate company. it's is progress
-
Definitely look at traffic and conversions, and start with those.
Also, re: affiliates, are the affiliates themselves complaining about 404s? Most any affiliate programs/management systems have the ability to shut off links. I assume they then inform affiliates to change links.
-
It takes all kinds :). I think to me maybe a learned response any time I click a link and see a redirect unless I implicitly trust the site I'm alt+f4'ing right away. I don't want popups, I don't want redirects I want to go where I say to go, even if where I said to go is empty. At least I got there and now can make a conscience choice what to do next.
Maybe just preference.
-
I would disagree, I would prefer to be taken to the sub category page to show me similar products with a message saying the product you was looking for is no longer available, please check out these very similar products - but I guess we all have different tastes and thats why as webmasters we can never please everybody
-
Thanks Donford, you really got a point to see it from a user perpective. and want to consider this also as an option and using the canonical of the parent.i'm talking about productpages that won't return anymore. For pages that will, we already cover like the way you described.
grtz, Leonie
-
Hi Leonie
I am not completely against 301's for these situations but from a user experience level I don't like when I got to X url and end up at Y url. I understand the reason from an SEO perspective but I don't like it from a user perspective. I take this into account when I make my decisions for my personal sites as well as my company's.
For e-commerce sites I prefer one of two methods. For products that "may" one day return I prefer to leave the page up, disable checkout / add to cart features and provide users similar buying choices along with an out of stock "email me when available again" option.
For products that will likely never be available again I still prefer to leave the page up, provide alternatives for them to buy, and then canonical the URL to parent. The second option works in two ways. First you don't miss the traffic from others linking to you, second you give the page's credit back to the parent category while reducing the no longer available page's chance of being a SERP result and up the parent's. Eventually the page will fall off the SERPs. Once a year you can do a sweep to see if any of the no longer available pages are getting any views if not then just remove them.
Both options provides users a better experience then "O you want to go here, O, I say you go here!" that 301's induce. I am not saying there is no place for 301's, in this sort of case I think the alternatives maybe a tad better, though maybe a little harder to implement.
-
Thanks Andy. i know affliate don't help SEO, but have 404 errors through the affiliate company, trying to solve it, but have to take care at this right now.about the time: difficult to say what's good, will monitore it the next period. 6 months sounds reasonable, though that are lots of 301 's
-
Hi
Firstly Affilaite links usually don't help towards SEO as they go through the affiliate company i.e. Awin, so the link juice actually is passed to awin, not yourself.
Once a product has sold out on our site, we 301 to the category page as this is the best user experience, while they can't get the exact product they are after at least they are still landing on a relevant section of the site - I've seen some examples where companies 301 to the homepage, but this isn't a good user experience.
Time periods for the 301s is a bit hard to say, I would track and see if they haven't had anybody click on the old link for 6 months to remove the 301 - but thats my opinion. Some would argue longer and I have spoken to others who say three months. What ever time period you do chose, keep an eye on 404 errors and if a decent number of these keep popping up, keep extending your 301 window.
Thanks
Andy
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
-
Disavow links old links
We have built a lot of sites and there a few sites we no longer manage or want any association with. When I have looked at webmasters I can see 20 to 200+ odd links back to our site. The page however at source has no reference to our website. I have searched the code but there isn't anything. Is it safe to disavow these or just leave them?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Redirect /label/ to /tags/
Hi guys, I have noticed loads of errors in webmaster, page not found.. /label/..... what i need to do is to a 301 redirect to /tags/... can some one tell me the redirect code to help fix this issue Regards T
Technical SEO | | Taiger0 -
Title Tag vs. H1 / H2
OK, Title tag, no problem, it's the SEO juice, appears on SERP, etc. Got it. But I'm reading up on H1 and getting conflicting bits of information ... Only use H1 once? H1 is crucial for SERP Use H1s for subheads Google almost never looks past H2 for relevance So say I've got a blog post with three sections ... do I use H1 three times (or does Google think you're playing them ...) Or do I create a "big" H1 subhead and then use H2s? Or just use all H2s because H1s are scary? 🙂 I frequently use subheads, it would seem weird to me to have one a font size bigger than another, but of course I can adjust that in settings ... Thoughts? Lisa
Technical SEO | | ChristianRubio0 -
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect?
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect? If this scenario requires a 301 redirect no matter what, I might as well update the URL to be a little more keyword rich for the page while I'm at it. However, since these pages are ranking well I'd rather not lose any authority in the process and keep the URL just stripped of the ".html" (if that's possible). Thanks for you help! [edited for formatting]
Technical SEO | | Booj0 -
Why does my 301 show the old urls with new descriptions and titles?
Hi all, We've just rebranded. The 301 appears to have worked well and moved the results and rankings onto the new domain. However a site:olddomain.com search in Google brings up about a hundred pages that have the new titles and descriptions but show the old urls - does anyone have any idea how to make the old domain disappear from the SERPS? Many thanks, Richard
Technical SEO | | panini0 -
Wordpress categories causing too many links/duplicate content?
I've just added categories to my wordpress site and some of the posts show in several of the categories. Will this cause me duplicate content problems as I want the category pages to be indexed? Also as I add more categories I'm creating more links on the page. They can't be seen to the user as I have a plugin that creates drop down categories. When I go to 'view source' though all the links are there so google will see lots of links. How can I fix the too many links problem? And should I worry about duplicate content issue?
Technical SEO | | SamCUK1 -
Domain name with separated/non-separated keywords
I start a new webshop within a month about spices and coffee. I'm thinking about the domain name to take. I would like to get visitors from coffee and spice keyword searches. How much does it matter (in terms of SEO) if I use spiceandcoffee instead of spice-and-coffee? (The site will be hungarian and it sounds easy to remember without the hypen: fuszer-es-kave or fuszereskave.) Does Google weighing more separated keywords in domain, instead of non-separated?
Technical SEO | | joo0 -
Does 301 redirect pass "freshness?"
Greetings! I work for an online retailer, and we recently launched a voting tool that allows customers to voice their opinion whether or not we should carry a new item. It's been a huge success and we've been generating thousands of comments. As a result, it's helped our SEO, and our products are showing up on the first page for some keywords without having any external links pointing to these pages. Our plan is to sell a product if it does well during the voting period. Unfortunately, we're not able to process the sale on the voting page, and need to redirect users to another page on our site. I understand that a 301 redirect transfers "linkjuice" to the new destination URL. But does it also transfer "freshness?" I ask because our new landing pages will not be updated as frequently as the voting pages. Example of our Voting Page:
Technical SEO | | znotes
http://www.uncommongoods.com/voting/product/50012/infant-fortune-cookie-booties Example of Redirected Item Page (where sale can be processed):
http://www.uncommongoods.com/product/baby-tube-socks-set-of-4 Any help/comments would be appreciated. Thank you!0