How to handle outdated products/pages?
-
Hi,
I wonder how I should handle pages with outdated products. Our market is changing rapidly unfortunately so products we offered in the past are no longer existent.
So for example one of our product was called "PRODUCT 1"
The URL for this product is still:
www.mydomain.com/product-1/with different subpages about the product like:
www.mydomain.com/product-1/about/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/howto/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/pricing/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/whatever/Our new product is totally different from the first one.
Is it still a good idea to set up 301 redirects or are there any other ideas?
Thanks in advance
Bastian -
Hello Bastian,
With regard to outdated products the best solution I have found is to 301 redirect the old product URL to the closest category page. I prefer this to redirecting to another product page because once the new product is outdated you'll be going through multiple redirects.
Look into updating the old blog posts and making them more relevant for readers today. If you are unable to do that I would just leave them where they are. As they get outdated they should drop in the rankings anyway. Or you could 301 redirect them to a more recent post.
-
Hi Kyle,
thanks for your fast answer.
It's really difficult for me where to get started. I have the same problem with old blog posts. Should I keep all the old blog posts even they are not relevant and bad written?
Or is it sometimes a good choice to make a break and build a new website from scratch with just some of the "old" good pages and focus on new relevant content?
Thanks in advance
Bastian -
Hi Bastian,
You're quite fortunate here in that your URL structure is very simple. When product SKUs, item IDs and search parameters enter the mix it can complicate things further. However, given your clean URLs you should be able to 301 redirect without any problems.
The question is where do you 301 that product URL (and its subfolders)? Maybe a new product has superseded it - that might be a good fit; or maybe you can redirect to a category that contains similar products; or if this product has been discontinued and there are no similar products elsewhere on your site, you could 301 back to the homepage.
Of course, you'll want to ensure that your internal linking is also up to scratch and reflects the changes you want to make. Either remove the internal links to that page or send them elsewhere (preferably the former if the product is no longer in stock).
Happy redirecting.
K
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
-
Spam pages / content created due to hack. 404 cleanup.
A hosting company's server was hacked and one of our customer's sites was injected with 7,000+ pages of fake, bogus, promotional content. Server was patched and spammy content removed from the server. Reviewing Google Webmaster's Tools we have all the hacked pages showing up as 404's and have a severe drop in impressions, rank and traffic. GWT also has 'Some manual actions apply to specific pages, sections, or links'... What do you recommend for: Cleaning up 404's to spammy pages? (I am not sure redirect to home page is a right thing to do - is it?) Cleaning up links that were created off site to the spam pages Getting rank bank // what would you do in addition to the above?
Technical SEO | | GreenStone0 -
Advice urgently needed on best practice for handling multiple product categories on Magento website
I have an ecommerce site built using Magento and urgently need advice on best practice for handling multiple product categories (where products appear in more than one category on the site creating multiple URLs to the same page). In April this year, based on advice from my SEO who felt that duplicate content issues were causing my rankings to be held back, I changed about 25% of the product categories to 'noindex, follow'. This has made organic traffic fall (obviously) as these pages fell out of Google's index. But, contrary to what I was hoping for, it didn't then improve rankings - not one iota, nothing - which was the ONLY reason why I did this. This has had a real negative impact on sales, so I'm starting to think this was actually an a terrible idea. Should I change them back? And to ask a wider question, what is best practice for this particular scenario?
Technical SEO | | Coraltoes770 -
Is it needed to use http:// or not?
Hi, When doing link building and getting my URL to other websites, is it necessary that the other websites include http:// before the domain? Example: I want to increase the number of links to my site www.example.com . When I ask other websites to add a link to my site, should I ask them to use http://www.example.com or is www.example.com enough (without http://)? Or it really does not matter? Thanks in advance, Sam
Technical SEO | | Awaraman0 -
Page Content
Our site is a home to home moving listing portal. Consumers who wants to move his home fills a form so that moving companies can cote prices. We were generating listing page URL’s by using the title submitted by customer. Unfortunately we have understood by now that many customers have entered exactly same title for their listings which has caused us having hundreds of similar page title. We have corrected all the pages which had similar meta tag and duplicate page title tags. We have also inserted controls to our software to prevent generating duplicate page title tags or meta tags. But also the page content quality not very good because page content added by customer.(example: http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/detaylar/evden-eve--6001) What should I do. Please help me.
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Why are pages linked with URL parameters showing up as separate pages with duplicate content?
Only one page exists . . . Yet I link to the page with different URL parameters for tracking purposes and for some reason it is showing up as a separate page with duplicate content . . . Help? rpcIZ.png
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Different links to to the same page
Hi, Based on the user's actions we post activity into users Facebook timeline. And each activity has link back to our particular page on our website. For example if original page was: www.Domain.com from Facebook timeline it would be like this: www.Domain.com?Ffb_action_ids=101508953168 Do you think this will have a negative effect on our page rankings as we will eded up having a lot of different URL's to the same page? www.Domain.com?Ffb_action_ids=101508953168 www.Domain.com?Ffb_action_ids=456788765609 etc.. Thank you, Karen Bdoyan
Technical SEO | | showme0 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
Does anyone see benefit in .com/en vs .com/uk for a UK site?
The client is already on /en and in my opinion there is not much to be gained by switching to /uk
Technical SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0