Out of Stock page ranking
-
When a competitive site is consistently ranking for a product that is never in stock, or in some cases, has been discontinued for several years and will never again be in stock, is there a way to communicate that information to Google?
-
The first thing I would do in this particular situation is to contact Kaboodle and see if you can get the Buy link to go to your store instead. They may have to remove that entry and you can post a new one.
That sparqstore domain expired on 01/26/2011 and is pending renewal or deletion from Network Solutions. It may be worth looking into how much it would cost to buy the domain and redirect relevant URLs like that to your product page.
That Kaboodle page is indeed a form of spam. It is what I would call a "stub page". Whether you report that page or not is up to you. Eugino provided the link above to where you would do the reporting. I would just say first that you should contact someone - by phone if possible - at Kaboodle to give them the chance to remove the page, as often this is just a matter of pour housekeeping and not outright spam.
Good luck.
-
Thanks for responding. Regarding your first question, how do I know the item will not be in stock, here is an example:
http://www.kaboodle.com/reviews/sparq-xlr8-digital-timing-system
That item was discontinued five years ago. If you click on the "Buy It Now" button, you will notice that it links to a url that is no longer maintained. I receive many inquiries about this product because it is similar to our line of products, so I wrote an article that not only discusses the product, but also mentions that the product was discontinued years ago. The article ranks well, but many people are frustrated by these stale links on other sites. I've contacted some of the shops that have stale links to clean things up though it does require considerable effort. It just seems that Google should be better at spotting these dead products, especially when "buy it now" points to a dead site.
Thanks again for responding.
Best,
Christopher -
There are many things to consider: first, if its your competitor, how would you know that the product will not be in stock anymore? If the whole website is ranking well, and no spammy procedures have been made by this website, there is no way to communicate it to Google, I think. And anyway, if its not a big problem, Google will not take it into consideration anyway.
Please note that Google has many ways in order to understand if a page is relevant (one of this is bounce rate, etc.)
So if a customer is not satisfied with what he/she finds in your competitors page, cause there is not the product that is being looked for, he/she will leave the page, and Google will notice that.
I would:
1. Try tell your competitor (even as unsatisfied customer) that the page in which they offer the product, is not valid, so please if they can take action to make it more relevant or remove it if needed.
2. Try rank better for that product on my own website. Once I'll have shares, compelling content, great user experience on page (and a few bunch of natural links if possible ), my page would rank better and outdo my competitors page (even if domain age and auth may be higher)
Anyway, if you really would like to send a request to Google, you can read this guide https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en
Hope this helps
Eugenio | Social Engagement
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
-
What tool can I use to find the top traffic-driving keyword for a batch of pages from multiple sites?
I thought I might be able to use Ahref's Batch Analysis for this, but that just gives stats on backlinks. I have a several lists of thousands of pages scraped for particular sets of keywords, but what I need is some way to automate fetching the biggest keyword that each page ranks for - biggest being the keyword that is estimated to drive the most organic traffic. Is there a tool out there that does something like this?
Competitive Research | | helenlorettahasan0 -
(Need helps here!) Can homepage and other internal pages (services) rank high together on Google?
Hi Moz community, Recently I am working on our website's SEO. Our company is a marketing agency. We provide general marketing services and also web design. Here is the content of our homepage and internal pages (specific services). Homepage (marketing agency) Internal page #1 (XXX marketing service) Internal page #2 (YYY marketing service) Internal page #3 (web design) I suggest to my supervisor that we could make some improvement and optimize different keywords for these 4 pages, respectively (homepage, internal page #1 #2 #3). However, my supervisor holds a different point of view that homepage and internal page#3 cannot rank both high for their own keywords because web design is not as related to marketing. So I did some research and look for some top-ranking marketing agency guys who also offer web design. I found their internal pages about web design service rank pretty bad for their own web-design-related keywords. Here are my thoughts and guess (please correct me if I am wrong): Google takes everything into account and deems web design to be kind of irrelevant content to the website, so the internal page for web design will not rank high. The internal page has so much lower power than the homepage so it got outranked by the guys whose homepages are all about web design and development. My question is: In above case, can homepage and other internal pages (our services) all rank high together for their own keywords? I know what I wrote is kind of confusing...But I really need help here and want to solve this problem badly. Really appreciate any help!! Thank you in advance! Best, Raymond
Competitive Research | | Raymondlee0 -
Why have I slipped off the 1st page?
Hi Forum, this has me baffled. I'm an experienced SEOer and have many sites ranking well for their clients but this one has me completely demented. I work for Easigrass.com and we used to rank on page one for the key term "artificial grass". Now we're on page 3 and this has all happened since we launched the new (Better) site in February 2016. We have better content, better seo, better social media and better linking than all of the major competitor sites but we still seem to be falling down the ranks. I don't know if its me just trying too hard and missing simple things but I cant see if we're being penalized or not. For searches performed in the UK we're currently 22nd (we used to be 5th!) Our competitors are; artificial-grass.com
Competitive Research | | Easigrass
expressgrass.com
artificialgrass-direct.com
artificiallawn.co.uk The one area that keeps popping up is potentially keyword stuffing but that can't be the only problem. We must be getting penalised somewhere!0 -
Ranking and Domain/Page Authority
I'm not seeing a very good correlation between ranking and domain/page authority. Am I missing something here? ie., 2nd raning at 1/0. Also seeing competitor as "12" domain authority in "competitive domain analysis", but shows much higher here for same competitor? <colgroup><col width="94"> <col width="171"> <col width="108"></colgroup>
Competitive Research | | delphia
| Page Authority | Page Linking Root Domains | Domain Authority |
| 70 | 40 | 83 |
| 1 | 0 | 41 |
| 51 | 3 | 97 |
| 34 | 5 | 36 |
| 41 | 3 | 52 |
| 23 | 1 | 59 |
| 59 | 49 | 100 |
| 48 | 2 | 100 |
| 52 | 6 | 77 |
| 27 | 2 | 14 |
| 1 | 0 | 57 |
| 15 | 1 | 36 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 24 | 1 | 57 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 21 | 1 | 36 |1 -
What's causing this site to rank better than another?
As I work on getting a grasp for what causes sites to rank better than others, I'm a bit stumped with two of our competitors. When you search Google for "essay editing" you get these results: 1. Ivyeyesediting.com 2. papercheck.com 3. gradesaver.com 4. scribendi.com 5. essayedge.com When you put these in OSE, it seems crazy that Ivyeyes is anywhere near the top. For example, essayedge creams these guys on EVERY single category. As a new SEO here, what am I missing. This makes absolutely no sense to me. Not only that, it's pretty discouraging seeing essayedge so far down the SERPS with what appears to be some really great numbers. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Competitive Research | | Kibin0 -
Tool for finding what keywords a competitor ranks for?
Does anyone know of any good tools that display what keywords a competitor ranks for? I have many competitors that I know get a lot of traffic, but I'm not entirely sure where the traffic comes from so it would be nice to plug in their url and get a general overview of what keywords they rank for and what positions.
Competitive Research | | shawn810 -
Best Way to Consolidate Domains/Rankings After Purchase of Competitor
One of my customers is buying a competitor. The competitor has a site that usually ranks just 1-2 spots below the main site that we manage for them (our site has been up for about a year, and their's is 15-years old). I am wondering what is the best way to consolidate the rankings/websites to take advantage of the purchase of the competitor's web assets. I would love to leave both sites up and just get 2 top-25 links to our products, but with no more marketing being done under the competitor's name, I assume their rankings will degrade. Would a basic 301 re-direct on a page-by-page basis be enough to 'steal' all of the juice their domain name/site has built? Is there some other method of using an older domain to boost the rankings of a newer one (I am assuming they only rank as well as we do because of how long they've been active - all of our metrics are better than theirs across the board). Thanks for any help/advice the community here can provide!
Competitive Research | | dschapira0 -
How many Page Rank 8 sites are there?
Anyone have any estimate of how many Page Rank 8 sites are out there? Best, Steve
Competitive Research | | Aggie0