E-commerce categrory out of stock items

[Horlogeboetiek]

Hi All,

I would like to hide all the products that are out of stock on my category pages, for example with a display:none (maybe there are better options/techniques do this....tips are welcome). The visitor has the options to reveal the out of stock items by using one of the filters, or by using a check-box "Show out of stock items".

Would this still be in line with Google's guidelines? Am I taking a risk to get a penalty cause I'm hiding content?

In my opinion it would not, cause I'm doing this to achieve a better user experience. Items are most of the time out of stock for a week not any longer.

Hope to hear from you guys.

Thanks in advance

Richard

[Everett]

Hello Richard,

That is a great question and I'm impressed by your attention to detail with regard to page-rank distribution changing as things go in and out of stock.

To answer your question, I don't think you risk being penalized for displaying in this way any more than thousands of other sites, including huge brands, risk it by using drop-down divs (e.g. "read more" , "transcript") and tabbed product description areas (e.g. "sizes", "description", "technical details", "Shipping costs") to break up the pertinent information into bite-sized chunks for the user. I work on a site that has checkboxes the user can uncheck to hide certain items if they don't wish to see them. This all uses similar coding to what you have described.

As long as you never specifically target Google (as in say "If Googlebot, then show this content, else show this other content) I think you'll be fine.

With that said, you may want to look into using a View-All rel canonical page to take care of that page-rank distribution issue you mentioned, depending on how it impacts the load-time of the page and how many links you will be sending part of your page-rank to: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html . If it were me I'd just stick to the solution you first asked about, but there are plenty of options.

Also think about the UX when a visitor lands on the out-of-stock product page. All it takes is a few quality raters or a few hundred organic visitors who land on that page while it's out of stock to give it a bad rating or a fast back-click to the SERPs and you could find yourself battling the effects of Panda, at least as far as I understand the process. Some options to improve that user experience include: Estimated date that the product will come back; ability to backorder; ability to sign up for an email alert when it gets back in stock; related product links with images.

Good luck!

Everett

[AsafY]

I've made this change in September, and from the users point of view the experience is much better, I read some time ago that Google takes into account different sorting of categories,

Even when you add new products to a category, some of the others get pushed back, So I hope Google does know how to handle it.

I haven't tried to hide 'out of stock' products but I'm always careful with hiding stuff on the client side since this can be interpreted the wrong way by Google.

I think that doing it server side is better but It's the same like sorting.

The only reason to show an 'out of stock' product on top is if It's really popular and if you either know when It's coming back to stock or let the user subscribe to a 'back in stock' email.

Hops this helps

[Horlogeboetiek]

Thanks for your reply Asaf,

What I don't like about your solution is the fact that products keep moving between different pagination pages. This means Google will find the pages deeper in the hierarchical structure every now and then. It's hard to build a history on a specific ranking cause incoming link juice keeps changing.

Did you find out if hiding 'out of stock' items can cause a penalty?

Thanks again Asaf

[AsafY]

I had the same problem,

What I finally did is to sort the products and always placing the temp out of stock products at the end of the list / or on the last page.

When a product is discontinued I remove it and 301 redirect to a similar product.

Asaf