To delete or not? That is the question..
-
In the case of an eCommerce store with a large catalogue of branded goods the inventory is constantly being adjusted as products become discontinued. Each year most fashion brands have 2 or 3 launches. At this same time they will delete some (not all) of previous years collections. Once we have sold through the remaining inventory of last season's products the question is how to proceed?
a) delete products to avoid customers landing on page, then only to be disappointed when product is no longer available to purchase..
b) keep products however mark as discontinued / no longer available and show a link to a similar product if applicable..
I am coming around to the opinion that b) provides a better user experience. However will this growing catalogue of old products (pushed to bottom of category page) help keep content of site full and have SEO advantages? If this is the case then that helps confirm b) as best choice??
-
Hi
Thanks. We do canonicalise sizes though not colours as the colour can be an important search term..
-
Ha! Yes, I noticed the Google goggle thing.
I get that each is a separate SKU and landing page. I'm suggesting why compete with yourself? Use canonical tags to tell Google (for ranking purposes) you want to consolidate all the SEO equity (and content) from all three pages into the category page (making it richer and stronger). Theoretically, if someone searches for "SkiEyes ExEyes goggles in red", Google will render the red landing page. If the same searcher searches for "SkiEyes ExEyes goggles", the category page will display.
-
Donna, Thanks for your reply. In this case each of these goggles in each colour is a separate sku and landing page. (Also apologies to use google and goggle in same sentence
-
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your example or intent, but in my mind, the ideal situation would be where Google ranks the category page that lists and links to all the different color options. The specific black, red, and blue goggle pages would be canonicaled back to the main category page, allowing you to consolidate SEO equity there.
-
Thanks for responses so far. I have been thinking further on this question and a further question has presented itself;
Consider the example where you sell ski goggles. Company SkiEyes produces a gents goggle called ExEyes in three colours, black, blue and red. It has been a best seller for years with plenty of sales, traffic and links (one for each colour). Now the blue has been discontinued whilst the red will be out of stock for 2 weeks. In the case of a customer making a google search 'SkiEyes ExEyes' the ideal scenario would be that google ranks in stock black colour at top, then out of stock red and further down the discontinued.. Any thoughts on how this could be achieved?
-
Alick
Thanks for link to moz article which is excellent. I like the suggestion of a custom 404 page for certain cases. Also as 404 pages lose link juice they suggest best option is to leave products on site though with suggested alternatives;
One of the more important aspects to my question was regarding SEO, ie will keeping discontinued products be superior to a 404 and the answer is within the article you link to... Also I am coming to the opinion that the best customer experience is to keep the product on site (however at bottom of list of products in their category) with suggestions for alternative choices. This way the customer doesn't hit a dead end and we keep any traffic and/or link juice ..
-
Donna
Thanks for the Matt Cutts video which I had been unaware of. I would consider our site to be more in the medium category. We are unable to predict an expiry date as our products don't have such a date i.e. some will continue for years and others will sell poorly and be discontinued after a few months. Also I am not in complete agreement that a 404 page is no more frustrating than a page which shows the original product albeit with a discontinued note. At least in the latter scenario the customer has an image and details of the original product to work from. Even better if we make suggestions of similar products...
-
Hi,
Yes option 'b' would be the best choice in my opinion. I also suggest you to read below article.
https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content
Thanks
-
Matt Cutts recommends a strategy based on the size of your product inventory. For large sites (like yours), he recommends configuring an unavailable_after meta tag when the page is created. The tag will effectively provide Google with a page expiry date which will be treated the same as a removal request. The page will be removed from search results about a day after the expiry date.
That solution doesn't help folks who have bookmarked the expired product page or sent there from one of your referral partners. For those, you'll still need to create a custom (redirected-to) page that explains what's happened - the product has been discontinued, is no longer available, and showcase similar products, if applicable. As you said, it will provide a much better user experience.
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
-
Schema question
Caresma Building
Web Design | | esiow2013
Alamang St., Bel-Air,
Makati City,
Philippines
1209 (632) 890-0062
[email protected] Question 1: What is the difference if i remove itemprop="address" after the Question 2: Do i need this line or should I remove it since "telephone" and "email" are also under "PostalAddress"? Thanks in advance! 🙂0 -
Question & Answers Forum pluggin for wordpress
I am looking to install on my website a Question & Answers Forum pluggin for wordpress Like MOZ Q&A What pluggin do you recommend for questions and answers Would be to replace the one on this site that i don't like due to some problems i have on configuration. http://www.propdental.es/dentista/
Web Design | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Keywords in url - specific case question
There are a bunch of questions about keywords in the url and so far what I've gathered is that it's good to have them but keep it simple so it doesn't look stuffed. I'm working on redesigning some sites that were originally setup by a group who had no understanding of SEO (or perhaps I should say a misunderstanding) and spent a lot of time stuffing keywords EVERYWHERE. In some cases they weren't too far off but in others I think they just went overboard. One of the areas I'm trying to fix are the paths which leads to the following concerns. One of the sites has a basketball section and through the use of the Adwords keyword tool they determined that most people are searching for "basketball hoops". My first question is, how reliable are the monthly search numbers in the Adwords keyword tool? Are they accurate enough to warrant forming keyword strategies based on the results? As it relates to the url issue, the current tree for the basketball section of the site looks like this: /basketball (the landing page for the whole section, there are other sport specific pages as well) /basketball/hoops (goes nowhere. not sure why they didn't just go to /basketball-hoops/x for other pages) /basketball/hoops/72in-backboards (the systems are split into three different backboard sizes, these pages group them onto one overview page per size) /basketball/hoops/72in-backboards/specific-basketball-goal (the actual basketball goal details page with options to buy and such) So what I'm wondering about this setup is: does having /basketball/hoops take care of having the "basketball hoops" search term or would it be more effective to switch to /basketball-hoops? If it's fine to leave it at /basketball/hoops, do you think it would be beneficial to create an actual page for that path? We found that actually more people search for "basketball basket" than "basketball hoops" so maybe that would be a good page to try to make use of that term and explain maybe why people think "basket" instead of "hoop" and why we call ours "goals" or something. I tend to navigate pages by deleting path arguments and I hate when I land on a nonexistent path so I'm leaning toward changing the paths but just don't know if it's worth it at this point. Additionally, on one of the other sites, we have a domain that is the main keyword we want to rank for: swingsets.com The other company I mentioned then decided to put all of the product pages under: swingsets.com/swing-sets/{category}/{set-height}-{'swing-set'|'playset'|'swingsets'|'play-set'|etc...}/combo{#} So that comes out to look something like this: swingsets.com/swing-sets/outback/5ft-playsets/combo2 I've never liked that path setup. It looks stuffed to me, especially once they start using '5ft-swing-sets' and '6ft-play-set' on other product pages. It's inconsistent which is another issue I have since I tend to surf by path. Another issue with that setup is the final argument of combo{#} but there's nothing I can really do about that because they call the products out as combinations. The only actual product name is the "outback" part. I've been trying to come up with a better path setup for a long time now but again I'm concerned that I may just be wasting my time. The only thing I did do was make the height section consistently {height}-playsets. Is that good enough or should these paths remove /swing-sets from the beginning? The actual /swing-sets page is a good and valuable landing page but then I'm not sure if it remains valuable to keep it in the paths for the product pages afterward. Any insight into this dilemma would be appreciated. I've been stewing over this for a long time and my reasoning always becomes circular since I can see plenty of reasons for keeping them the way they are and simplifying them.
Web Design | | EscaladeSports0 -
Website Redesign 301 Question
Hey Moz gang, I have a question that I believe I know how I'm going to handle, but just wanted some feedback from the Moz community on best practices. At my company, we're going through a site redesign. At the moment, our site is deeper than it should be with many one-off feature pages. For example, we have a Features page that then links to individual pages for each specific feature. One goal we have set for the redesign is a condensing of the pages in order to make the site more user-friendly, easy to manage and content rich. My question is this. We have a lot of these individual pages that I want to essentially kill and merge into one page. It is okay (best practice) to 301 all of those individual feature specific pages to the single Features page since that is now where all of that content lives?? I want to retain the link juice that those pages have gained over time, but I don't want to get penalized for too many 301's to a single page. Any advice or previous experience would be awesome 🙂 Thanks, Lance
Web Design | | RobinBryant10 -
Question About Site Redesign and Nav / Page Structure
Hey guys, i am currently redesigning our company's site, and have come across some things that I'm not quite sure of. We used to have individual service pages in our main navigation (design, video, marketing) before the redesign. In this new design, i had the idea of making just one "services" or "capabilities" page, where these three services would each be outlined, and each service would have a list of links to more specific landing pages. Obviously, breaking it up correctly with HTML5 using the andtags. What I'm wondering is that if i'm going to be penalized for having those three services that aren't necessarily related too closely on the same page as opposed to having the one page for each service (like we have now). Any help would be greatly appreciated, and let me know if i need to elaborate more. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | RenderPerfect0 -
Adding another Question Topic
I am wondering if SEOMoz would consider adding a Question Topic called Webmasters. I see many questions that require answers from webmasters and I have some questions to ask that would require a webmaster to answer. Would it be better to find the answers on another platform? If the question is yes any recommendations on which forums are good for these types of questions?
Web Design | | polarking1 -
TOP 5 Questions I Should Ask a web designer or developer?
I want to redesign my website to work better with SEO and crawls. I need to make sure I hire a good designer/developer but I don't have a ton of money to spend. What are the top 5 questions I should ask a web designer/developer to ensure they are good designers and have successfully implemented SEO??...or at least a site that is crawled well and has some SEO built in.
Web Design | | CapitolShine0 -
H1 image replacement question
Working with content folks on a new section of our website. Developed a new logo for this section of the site, and they want to incorporate the style of it into all of the page headings. The only way to pull this off is to use images for H1's. (Without getting into unnecessary detail, they have to be images - too precise to try text over background images.) I made everyone aware of the importance of H1 text for SEO purposes, but they really want these images. When I first attempted SEO back in 2003, I recall doing a site using CSS image replacement along these lines: Widget Page #example {
Web Design | | c2g
background: url(../images/example.gif) no-repeat;
text-indent: -5000px;
} That was nearly 10 years ago, and they definitely ranked for the H1s at the time which led me to believe it worked. Anyone know if this is considered an acceptable practice today? I read some other threads about enclosing the image in tags and relying on the ALT text, but that doesn't seem to be a good option.0