Is it worth setting up 301 redirects from old products to new products?

[indigoclothing]

This year we are using a new supplier and they have provided us a product database of approx. 5k products. About 80% of these products were in our existing database but once we have installed the new database all the URLs will have changed.

There is no quick way to match the old products with the new products so we would have to manually match all 5k products if we were were to setup 301 rules for the old products pointing to the new products. Of course this would take a lot of time.

So the options are:

1. Is it worth putting in this effort to make the 301 rules?

2. Or are we okay just to delete the old product pages, let the SE see the 404 and just wait for it to index the new pages?

3. Or, as a compromise, should we 301 the old product page to the new category page as this is a lot quicker for us do do than redirecting to the new product page?

[indigoclothing]

As a follow up to this post, we launched the new site 3 weeks ago and seen a site-wide drop in SERPS

Of course there could be other variables involved, but we pushed ahead with the new product db without 301-ing the old products to new products as when we tried to do it, it was a far too time consuming exercise trying to pair up all the URLs in Excel.

Google has already indexed the new pages so hopefully the new site structure will not cause long term damage. In the mean time trying to 301 redirect as many of the best performing old product pages (as per Page Authority in the PRO crawl diagnostic tool).

[therealmarkhall]

If the old products are indexed then you will get some long tail traffic to the no doubt, so deleting the page is a no no, i would either keep the page and display the new products underneath or 301 to the new product page.

[therealmarkhall]

If the old products are indexed then you will get some long tail traffic to the no doubt, so deleting the page is a no no, i would either keep the page and display the new products underneath or 301 to the new product page.

[matbennett]

The answer probably differs from site to site.  I'd start by looking at how much you earn a month from people who land on product pages to give you an idea of the potential cost of that traffic bouncing.

I suspect that the compromise is something along the lines of redirecting to categories as you suggest.  However I would additionally be looking at all of the top entry pages that are product pages and 301ing those.  How many will depend on that value.

Also do talk to your developer.  It might not be as hard to match the old urls to the new ones as you imagine.  There are usually some fields that you can tie together and build a redirect rule from.

Another alternative to directing to the category page might be to direct to a search (it can still return a 404 if you wish).  If your URLs were KW rich you might be able to turn that in to a search so that the product still comes up.

Few options there to think about.  Good luck with it.

[Aran_Smithson]

From a usability perspective I'd look at the redirects as a 404 is some what off putting when your trying to buy. It could lead to visitors losing trust and ultimately sales.

In turn, if usbility is effected in such a way then doubtless the SEO will follow.

If you have matching products which have indexed pages with some page authority, then I'd take the time to redirect them.

Your compromise is not bad, it would save a mountain of time which can be devoted to other cool things and its certainly better than several thousand 404 errors!