E-commerce: Taking care of expired product pages
-
Hi,
I work for an e-commerce company in the fashion sector. As you probably know/can guess it is very popular for bloggers and other influencers to link to our products. But the problem is that our products often have a lifespan of only 2-3 months before they expire.
Is the best solution to do a 301-redirect to the closest category page for expiring product pages? To make sure we don't lose these links to 404-pages.
Or are there any other good solutions popular among e-commerce companys?
Thanks for taking your time!
-
Those have been my main thoughts aswell. And you guys responses seem to agree with that. Thank you for your contribution!
-
Since you have popular bloggers/sites linking to your products, it's definitely a good idea to think about user experience. If the site is out of stock of the original item, it may be smart to just link to overarching category (for example, if it's a t-shirt, redirect it to the "tops" page).
-
In your case it may be worth it to do this: Keep the pages accessible, show that the product is no longer in stock and then show similar products the user may be interested in instead.
If this is not possible (too complicated, site too big), I would 301 redirect to the closest category page, maybe with a notification at the top that the product is no longer available and that is why the user was redirected to the category page.
Have a look at this blog post: https://econsultancy.com/blog/65562-seo-considerations-for-discontinued-products-in-ecommerce/
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
-
Product Listings - is it worth indexing the whole product catalogue?
I'm working on a site that has around 500 product listings. This is for a rental company without any sort of ecommerce platform, so, there's no prices, no adding a product to a cart, etc. Also, there are no different sizing / color options for each product, so each product is the canonical version. After some restructuring, we're starting to see a lot of 404s and just some general mess. I have a couple of thoughts. My first is to just noindex each product. We hardly get any direct traffic to an individual product page, and if they land anywhere related to products, it's usually a category page. If I noindex the products, I don't have to worry about the 404s. My second is to implement the rel=canonical tag on each product to correspond to its primary category. While this is sort of liberal use of the canonical tag, I'm thinking that it could help drive more organic traffic to the category pages. Does anyone have any insight or thoughts on this? Thank you very much!
Technical SEO | | Savage-Solutions0 -
Does a number of products in anchor text (link to product list page) have any influence on SEO?
For example: shower cabins (660), used in our onpage-navigation which links to a product list page.
Technical SEO | | Maxaro.nl0 -
Effect of 302 redirects from empty parent page to sub page
A client's website has links to their service pages which then redirect (302 through a php "Location:" header) to that service's first sub-page. For example, our-services/service-x redirects to our-services/service-x/about-service-x I can only think this has been done because there is no actual content for the parent page and to maintain some kind of structure for navigation and URLs. Really there's no reason why the 'about-service-x' page can't be removed and its content transferred to the main 'service-x' page. Then the redirects can be removed also - it's not how a 302 should be used for a start. I'm just wondering what kind of effect this current redirection has on SEO, as I know 302s don't pass any link juice? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | driftingbass0 -
Wordpress Archive pages
In the SEOMOZ site report a number of errors were found. One of which was no or duplicate meta desctions on certain blog pages. When I drilled down to find these i noticed thosepages are the wordpress autocreated archive pages. When I searched for these through the wordpress control panel through both pages and blogs they were nowhere to be found. Does anyone know how to find these pages or are they not something I need to worry about?
Technical SEO | | laserclinics0 -
Find where the not selected pages are from
Hi all Can anyone suggest how I can find where gtoogle is finding approx. 1000 pages not to select? In round numbers I have 110 pages on the site site: searech shows all pages index status shows 110 slected and 1000 not selected. For the life of me I cannot fingure where these pages are coming from. I have set my prefered domain to www., setup 301 's to www. as per below RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^growingyourownveg.com$
Technical SEO | | spes123
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.growingyourownveg.com/$1" [R=301,L] site is www.growingyourownveg.com any suggestions much appreciated Simon0 -
I know I'm missing pages with my page level 301 re-directs. What can I do?
I am implementing page level re-directs for a large site but I know that I will inevitably miss some pages. Is there an additional safety net root level re-direct that I can use to catch these pages and send them to the homepage?
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
How do I eliminate indexed products?
Please help! We got clobbered by Penguin and are at risk of having to close down after 10 years. We have been trying to figure out why and believe now it might be because of duplicate content. We added 2" inserts in March (over 500): http://www.trophycentral.com/inserts1.html Even though each is a different products, SEOMOZ is saying they are considered duplicate content. Given the timing, we think this might be the cause, even though it is totally legitimate. Question - since these are now indexed and since we can't easily add content quickly, what is the best way to handle this situation? A no-index tag? Is there a way to let Google know that their algorithm is detroying legitimate businesses??
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
E-Commerce Categorization
I'm working on an e-commerce site that currently has about 50 root categories and growing, with no sub-categories. They are all linked from the sidebar of every page and all the products are pretty related. They could probably be sub-categorized in to 5 root categories. At want point does categorization become too flat?
Technical SEO | | BlinkWeb0