An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
-
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW.
Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages:
1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap!
2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories.
3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months
4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products.
Any suggestions of Comments about this structure?
Issues to think about:
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitorExtra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.
-
Also see answers on Wesley's other question thread here:
Should we noindex 65,000 product pages all at once or in steps? (paraphrasing) -
OK I understand a bit better now, yes I agree with what you are doing. All makes sense
-
Hi Alan,
Thanks for your reply!
Only the most impotant product pages are shown in the xml sitemap. Not in the HTML sitemap.
If the pages are live, than they stay in the sitemap. Off course when the pages are offline there is no sign of these pages anywere so not in the sitemaps and not in the website categories.The custom 404 returns indeed a 404 status code, so we don't got soft 404 problems
We also don't have any broken links on the website beceause links of deleted products are not shown
Thats right! You don't want to end up in a 404 loop! Crawlers will instantly hate your website...
But we really want to show some links on the custom 404 to help the visitor searching what he/she's looking for.
Just have to make sure that the links are working right_One question: You said "no redirect from internal links" but it's more about redirect from internal pages beceause all the links to productpages that are not exisiting anymore are getting removed.... Do you agree overall with the structure of 3 months redirecting and than the 404 page? _
_Note: the 3 months redirecting is important to not lose any visitors from organic rankings. It takes Google time to de-index the pages. _
Thanks in Advanced!
-
A few points, I would not put al these pages in the sitemap.xml, if you are a talking about a html sitemap visually showing on your site, then I would not have any links on y site that do not go directly to a page, don't want redirects from internal links, and you definitely don't want 404s.
You say you have a customized 404 page. does this page return a 404 status code? if not you will be getting soft 404 problems. Also a 404 page really should not have any images js or css files on it, especially if they are changing. if you get a broken link on your 404 page, such as a missing image, you will get a internal loop, and search engines really don't like that.
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
-
Preserve domain on 301 redirect?
We have a domain solely used for print advertising that does a 301 redirect to a landing page (a department home page) on our "real" domain that is indexed on Google. Example: www.bmwrepairs.com redirects to www.repairshop.com/bmwrepairs. Is there a way to do a 301 redirect so that when they get redirected, the URL in the browser address bar remains www.bmwrepairs.com?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jazee1 -
How should I go about repairing 400,000 404 error pages?
My thinking is to make a list of most linked to and most trafficked error pages, and just redirect those, but I don't know how to get all that data because i can't even download all the error pages from Webmaster Tools, and even then, how would i get backlink data except by checking each link manually? Are there any detailed step-by-step instructions on this that I missed in my Googling? Thanks for reading!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
What if a 301 redirect is removed?
Suppose the following scenarios after a 301 redirects from source URL to targent URL is removed. 1. If source URL raises a 404 error, will target URL retained the link juice previously passed from source URL? 2. If source URL starts to show different content than what is showing on target URL, will the previously passed link juice be credited back to the source URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bull1350 -
New Website. Changing TLD or not?
Hi, At my company we are making a new website because the days of the old one are numbered. We already decided that the folder structure will be changed so we have more "clean" url's. Now we also would like to change from .net/nl to .nl . Since we already are redirecting all url's (>10.000), we think this is the moment to switch the TLD. What do you guys think? Is their anyone who has some kind of experience/tip they would like to share?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO_ACSI0 -
Multiple 301 Redirects for the Same Page
Hi Mozzers, What happens if I have a trail of 301 redirects for the same page? For example,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
SiteA.com/10 --> SiteA.com/11 --> SiteA.com/13 --> SiteA.com/14 I know I lose a little bit of link juice by 301 redirecting.
The question is, would the link juice look like this for the example above? 100% --> 90% --> 81% -->72.9%
Or just 100% -----------------------------------------> 90% Does this link juice refer to juice from inbound links or links between internal pages on my site? Thanks!0 -
Undo a 301 redirect
Hi there, 4 months ago I have done a redirect from one domain to another. Now, after about 120 days I have just a few results from the old domain indexed. The problem is that I believe that the old domain name had a really big impact on rankings, as it had the main keyword in the domain name. I'm wondering now if I could restore the old domain just by taking out the 301 instruction and how will search engines react. Do you have any studies on that? Would it be possible? Matt Cutts himself did it with his own domain, but he doesn't talk specifically on the effect of the rankings: http://www.thedotcomblog.com/seo/redirects-after-change-in-domain-name Thanks in advance for any help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SandraMoZ0 -
Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0 -
We are changing ?page= dynamic url's to /page/ static urls. Will this hurt the progress we have made with the pages using dynamic addresses?
Question about changing url from dynamic to static to improve SEO but concern about hurting progress made so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | h3counsel0