E Commerce site - removing discontinued items
-
We have been hit with a Panda penalty and the site has slowly been losing rankings since January, I've now realised that we have 4000+ page indexed in Google, but only 2000 live products.
We have never deleted any of the pages with discontinued items, most of which were created when keyword stuffing and thin content reigned supreme - which explains the Panda penalty.
But which is the best and quickest way to delete them from Google?
We have already implemented a 'noindex' across all these pages, but as they are no longer in the 'crawlable' site, how will Google find them to know this?
Would a 404 work any better - I'm not concerned about any link juice etc to/from these pages, I just want rid.
I'm not sure if we can move all these pages into a dedicated directory which would allow us to use Google's Removal Tool - using it with the individual urls would be a mammoth task.
Any advice would be most greatly appreciated.
-
Sounds good. Thanks for following up and letting us know.
-
We decided to go with a 410 for those deleted items, some of which were up to 5 years old!. They had all gone within a couple of days. The more recent out of stock or deleted products we're 301ing back to the main category page.
Thanks to all for their responses.
-
If you just want to get rid of the pages, I'd 301 redirect them all to their corresponding category page or just all to the homepage. That way the search engines can find the redirects and make the adjustments and anyone who goes to the page (either from your site, a bookmark, or an external link) will not get an error.
If you have bad links to the pages, then just delete them, but note that you may end up with a bunch of errors and broken links on your site.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
First be sure that you do not have an unnatural links penalty or a penguin problem. If you have problems there fix them first.
Then get into webmaster tools. Determine which of these discontinued items pages have valuable links.
Then get into your analytics. Determine which of these discontinued items pages are still pulling traffic.
Any pages that has valuable links or is still pulling traffic could be valuable. Decide if you sell an updated product or can sell a similar product. If you can then use those pages for that new product. If you don't have a replacement product then decide if there is another way to monetize those pages. If yes, then do it. If no, then, 301 redirect those pages to an appropriate destination.
Any page that is not pulling traffic and has no valuable links can be deleted and the URL redirected to a category page or your homepage.
-
I would delete those pages. Please check this post http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2296653/Removing-Unnatural-Links-by-Removing-Pages-on-Your-Website
If you have bad content or bad links pointing to those pages you can delete those pages. Many ecommerce CMS systems have an option to only publish live / in stock articles. So you should be able to get rid of those pages easily!
I hope this helps
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
-
Two sites with same content
Hi Everyone, I am having two listing websites. Website A&B are marketplaces Website A approx 12k listing pages Website B : approx 2k pages from one specific brand. The entire 2k listings on website B do exist on website A with the same URL structure with just different domain name. Just header and footer change a little bit. But body is same code. The listings of website B are all partner of a specific insurance company. And this insurance company pays me to maintain their website. They also look at the traffic going into this website from organic so I cannot robot block or noindex this website. How can I be as transparent as possible with Google. My idea was to apply a canonical on website B (insurance partner website) to the same corresponding listing from website A. Which would show that the best version of the product page is on website A. So for example :www.websiteb.com/productxxx would have a canonical pointing to : www.websitea.com/productxxxwww.websiteb.com/productyyy would have a canonical pointing to www.websitea.com/productyyyAny thoughts ? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Evoe0 -
2 Duplicate E-commerce sites Risk vs Reward
Hi guys I have a duplicate content question I was hoping someone might be able to give me some advice on? I work for a small company in the UK and in our niche we have a huge product range and an excellent website providing the customer with a very good experience. We’re also backed up by a bespoke warehouse/logistic management system further enhancing the quality of our product. We get most traffic through PPC and are not one of the biggest brands in the industry and have to fight for marketshare. Recently we were approached by another company in our industry that have built up a huge and engaged audience over decades but can’t logistically tap into their following to sell the products so they have suggested a partnership. They are huge fans of what we do and basically want a copy of our site to be rebranded and hosted on a subdomain of their website and we would then pay them a commission of all the sales the new site received. So 2 identical sites with different branding would exist. Based on tests they have carried out we could potentially double our sales in weeks and the potential is huge so we are excited about the possibility. But…..how would we handle the duplicate content, would we be penalised? Would just one of the sites be penalised? Or if sales increase as much as we think they might, would it be worth a penalty as our current rankings aren’t great? Any advice would be great. Cheers Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_9950 -
Why isnt this site ranking?
I just took over for a site and noticed they have no presence for any keywords...not even low ranks. Their backlink profile is not the best, but webmaster tools says they have no manual actions. vonderhaar.com Thoughts on the matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Consensus on Paying to Remove Links
Hi all, For discussion... I am painstakingly working my way through a link profile, highlighting 'unnatural links' and contacting webmasters to try and get the links removed - I haven't got as far as 'disavow' or a 'Reconsideration Request' I have found a large number (around 150) of links from http://www.bookmarks4you.com and when I have attempted to contact the site for link removals I have had a payment request in order to do so. Now the amount being requested is low and so it may be worthwhile, however, I wondered what the consensus was with regards to this sort of demand? I know I could simply add the links to my 'disavow list' but for the sake of a small payment, I could get rid of them much quicker! Also, the majority of sites that I am contacting only have a contact from as opposed to an email address that I can use directly - what I am doing is taking a screen print of each contact form in order to have proof that I am actually doing the 'hard graft' as opposed to simply adding sites to a disavow list - is this a worthwhile exercise? Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
Is the Tool Forcing Sites to Link Out?
Hi I have a tool that I wish to give to sites, it allows the user to get an accurate idea of their credit score with out giving away any personal data and with out having a credit search done on their file. Due to the way the tool works and to make the implementation on other peoples sites as simple as possible the tool remains hosted by me and a one line piece of Javascript code just needs to be added to the code of the site wishing to use the tool. This code includes a link to my site to call the information from my server to allow the tool to show and work on the other site. My questions are: Could this cause a problem with Google as far as their link quality goes? - Are we forcing people to give us a backlink to use the tool? (in the eyes of Google) or will Google not be able to read the Javascript / will ignore the link for SEO purposes? Should I make the link in the code Nofollow? If I should make the link a Nofollow any tips on how to make the most of the opportunity from a link building or SEO point of view? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MotoringSEO0 -
Better SEO Option, 1 Site 3 Subdomains or 4 Separate Sites?
Hey Mozzers, I'm working with a client who wants to redo their web presence. They have a a main website for the umbrella and then 3 divisions which have their own website as well. My question is: Is it better to have the main site on the main domain and then have the 3 separate sites be subdomains? Or 4 different domains with a linking structure to tie them all together? To my understanding option 1 would include high traffic for 1 domain and option 2 would be building Page Authority by having 4 different sites linking to each other? My guess would be option 2, only if all 4 sites start getting relevant authority to make the links of value. But right out of the gates option 1 might be more beneficial. A little advice/clarification would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Removing Duplicate Page Content
Since joining SEOMOZ four weeks ago I've been busy tweaking our site, a magento eCommerce store, and have successfully removed a significant portion of the errors. Now I need to remove/hide duplicate pages from the search engines and I'm wondering what is the best way to attack this? Can I solve this in one central location, or do I need to do something in the Google & Bing webmaster tools? Here is a list of duplicate content http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=list&order=name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveMaguire
http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=list&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=grid http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=list Thanks in advance, Steve0