Removing entire site sections categories from an ecommerce store, best practices ?
-
Hi
Whats best practice when removing entire site sections from an e-commerce store due to ending those lines and not having similar alternative pages to redirect them too ?
Should you remove pages in GWT etc ?
Any other measures to prevent probs such as 404 spikes etc ??
Cheers
Dan
-
grt thanks Dennis
yes that what i meant
-
Hi Dan
Not quite sure what you meant.
Just remove them from the category that you'll be removing. 301 their old URL if it changes but if it doesn't then there's no need to.
-
thanks for your comments Richard & Dennis
what about sub categories and pages that do still exist either under other categories in the case of sub cats, or under sub cats in the case of some products ? I take it they need 301 redirecting if different url, but if flat naviagation url format used then i take it no 301 needed since its the same address ?
cheers
dan
-
Gather all the pages/urls. Send them to a blog post/news post why it's not there anymore then make it easy for them to get to your other pages. OR you can just redirect them to the home page, which Richard also mentioned.
-
If you have a relevant category I would redirect them there. If not, just send them to the homepage. You don't want to see 404s and neither do the people visiting your site.
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
-
Inbound Linking from your own sites
Good evening, On each of the sites I have made, I have a link with the anchor text 'Build and Design by Christoper Davies' to my own website. This link is in the footer of every page each of all the sites. Should I have a 'no follow' rel added to these links, or does linking from all the sites (on all pages) help my ranking? I am concerned that having so many inbound links from the same sites, with the same anchor text may be doing me more damage than good.
On-Page Optimization | | chrisdavieswebdesign0 -
SEO Ecommerce Consulting Firm
We are currently designing and developing our new ecommerce website. Due to the complexity involving in duplicate contents as well as the structure of ecommerce websites, we are looking for a firm who can help us on this. We have a team of 15 people here developing our site and need guidance for URL structure and general flow of the website (Site optimization) that is SEO friendly. This would enable us to build links effectively. Anyone can recommend us some strategic consulting firm for this work? We have seen moz recommended lists and still waiting for their reply. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | WayneRooney0 -
Is G clever enough to not consider many instances of a category kw on a category page as kw stuffing ?
Hi Say you have a category page on your ecommerce store for a range of a brands products you sell, say brand is called "Cool Surfboards" and is hence the pages target keyword. This page is being populated by name, image and snippet/description for each of the brands different products in the range, such as: "Cool Surfboards HiFive", "Cool Surfboards Rad" , " Cool Surfboards XYZ" etc etc etc Since there are many products in the range the kw is being repeated aprox 20 times. The page is scoring an A grade but obviously failing in regard to keyword stuffing. However if you remove the brand and rename the products by model name only then the sub product specific pages will fail to be optimised for 'brand and model' and it would seem silly to not name the product what it actually is. So the question is, i take it Google is clever enough to ignore kw stuffing in these types of instances since its not actually kw stuffing and hence should leave as is ? Or will G consider it stuffing/over optimised and you should remove the brand name for the individual product names to prevent this ? cheers dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Keyword usage in eCommerce Sites - Danger of keyword stuffing?
Hi all, I'm having a little difficulty deciding the best approach for selecting my product titles as I've encountered a few issues. I understand how important it is to try and use the keyword in your product titles, but about the category page that lists all of these products? One of category pages, for example, has 16 products on it. Each has the product title followed by the keyword. I have also used the keyword in the category title, URL, breadcrumbs and two or 3 times (because it was natural) in a paragraph that describes the category etc. Due to the little amount of text on the page, and the sheer amount of times that the keyword is being used, it looks like I am keyword stuffing (By Moz On Page Report Card). I think it came to 23 uses of the same keyword altogether. This is the pretty much teh same throughout every category page on my site, and think I was penalised by Google for this reason. I'm a relatively new site and have done everything by the book as far as I know, so everything is pointing at this to be the cause of the drop/disappearance in ranking. How do I rectify this problem? It's important for the products to have the keyword in, right? As this is one of the SEO practices that is given more weight when considering rankings. I have thought a potential way around this, which is to split the keyword between an exact match, and a variant of the keyword in the titles - only very slightly though. So my product titles would look like 'Product A Exact Match Keyword', 'Product B Variant on Keyword' etc. Could this work? Can anybody advise on the best thing I could try? I have attached an image to give you an idea of the layout of my category pages - Apologies in advance about my embarrassingly rubbish photoshop skills! I wasn't able to upload directly, so I have attached a link. Thanks for reading, John 4iIkmSx
On-Page Optimization | | John_Francis0 -
Should I remove the Jetpack Plugin From A SIte
I dont know if anyone has any experience with the jetpack plugin, but personally I prefer yoast. My point is someones site I am looking at has both Yoast SEO plugin and also Jetpack for wordpress, should I just remove the jetpack as it seems to be a very heavy loading plugin.
On-Page Optimization | | propertyhunter0 -
Competitor Out Ranks My Site
Hi This is my first question on SEOMoz and I am confused how a competitor can out rank me for a local search term SEO Tamworth. I have a higher Page Authority, Domain Authority, Number of links etc.. Would this be down to the quality of the links to my site or could it be down to the structure. I score an A for SEO on the on page analysis. Regards James
On-Page Optimization | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Seomoz.org Category and Tags practice
Hello, I have been checking seomoz sourcecode and architecture these days in order to learn and to apply it in my site but I havent managed to find "tags" at all. Just the "Posts by Categories" on the right sidebar. Is this the only way you are categorising content? In this case, the only way spiders have to find your content is via these category archive pages and the general sitemap? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | antorome0 -
Monitor site loading speeds
We all know that site loading speed is important for google ( and getting more important), and currently we are considering moving to a dedicated server. But I would like to measure pur current loading times and compare them to our competitors. I know that webmaster tools shows you your loading times, but its seems a bit random with its results, and I know analytics also now records speed, but the sample sizes seems to be too low. When I googled website load times, I got a load of different free tools but they seem to give conflicting results e.g one said that our avg kb load time was 0.02sec and our competitor was 0.01, but a different site says our sites loads in 1.7 secs and our competitor loads in 11sec (our home pages have similar total file size for our homepage. ) Also what would be useful would be a way to monitor of website loading speed to see when it slows down, so we can figure out why. Does anyone know of any good reliable programs or sites that does this?
On-Page Optimization | | eunaneunan0