What to do with sold product pages when everything you sell are unique one off items
-
Hi there,
This is something i have been unsure of for years. It's a little different to most ecom website situations. What would you do with product pages when every product is a "one off" unique product and once sold will never be for sale again?
Should i redirect to a category page? 404? Leave it as is marked as sold or say it is sold and show links to similar items?
At the moment we have 700 products for sale but over 5000 sold products that have their own product page and my concern is as this grows it could become a lot for a WordPress woocommerce site to handle?
I don't want to do anything to slow my site down or unnecessarily bloat it but i want to do the right thing by the visitor and also not do anything to hurt my rankings.
These pages often rank in google and may have been there for years before the item actually sells. To throw another curve ball, there may be multiple other products (for sale or already sold) with the exact same name but are unique and different from each other.
These products pages will often be 98% the same content as each other too.
To explain how this could be the case, we sell artworks from many different artists, Every artwork is an original and is unique. But many artists paint the same subject matter multiple times, albeit in a slightly different way from previous times.
So you end up with a unique product that has everything the same as another (same artist, same name of artwork, same size, same description, different image, different sku) but is actually different and unique.
This has left me somewhat uncertain of what is best to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you
-
Without being able to see the site, here are some steps I would recommend taking:
- 404 all sold products
- Ensure users must enter unique titles, descriptions, images. Even if they create something similar, these aspects could be unique
- Show "Similar Products" for all sold pieces
Redirecting technically isn't the best practice unless the destination is very similar. As well, this will slow down your site's server response times if done at scale. Allowing them as 200 status codes will create a lot of duplicate content it seems.
If you send the site, I could take a further look here!
-
We also have problems. For example, on the page [https://www.fitness-china.com/back-machine](https://www.fitness-china.com/back-machine "lat pulldown"), we have many **Lat Pulldown**. They are all products that **exercise back muscles**. Every year we release new products. Such products are also included. Need to write different product descriptions.
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
-
Page dropped after backlink
This is a bit of a odd one... I put two new pages on to my website. And built one backlink to each page (each from separate domains). The pages and backlinks have indexed quite quickly. The odd thing is that one of my pages has dropped significantly in ranking but the other has boosted significantly in ranking! The 1st page has come to page 1 of google, the other pages dropped to page 3 of google. Prior to building the links the ranks was stable. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Mass uploading low quality product pages
Hi Mozzers! I have a question on mass uploading low quality product pages We have a huge catalogue of products and our product managers are looking to mass reference 17,000 new products quickly on the website. Obviously, this will mean content will somehow have to be made unique - which would take a huge amount of resource. Apart from this issue, will adding this many new product pages in one go be bad for SEO? If we also do manage to make the content unique, but not high quality - we'll have 17,000 new low quality product pages - will this reduce our domain authority? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Two Similar Profile Pages: One Ranks 2 in Google - The Other 150
My client's site has a directory of doctors on it's site and they are targeting weight loss surgery patients. The problem is that when searching "weight loss surgeon richmond va" one of the doctor's profiles ranks 2nd in Google organic results while the other is not even in the first 10 pages. Both have very similar link profiles and I have checked all the technical things like noindex tags, canonicals, etc to see if that might be the problem but it all checked out. The second doctor's profile IS indexed in Google, just not ranking. We have done a lot of work to push his profile page up in the rankings but all efforts seem to have fallen short. Here are the profiles: http://advancedsurgicalpartnersofva.com/physicians/profile/Gregory-L-Schroder-MD - ranks 2 in Google http://advancedsurgicalpartnersofva.com/physicians/profile/Matthew-Brengman-MD-FACS - does not rank Any ideas would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrisvogel0 -
Duplicate Content: Is a product feed/page rolled out across subdomains deemed duplicate content?
A company has a TLD (top-level-domain) which every single product: company.com/product/name.html The company also has subdomains (tailored to a range of products) which lists a choosen selection of the products from the TLD - sort of like a feed: subdomain.company.com/product/name.html The content on the TLD & subdomain product page are exactly the same and cannot be changed - CSS and HTML is slightly differant but the content (text and images) is exactly the same! My concern (and rightly so) is that Google will deem this to be duplicate content, therfore I'm going to have to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of all subdomain pages, pointing to the original product page on the TLD. Does this sound like the correct thing to do? Or is there a better solution? Moving on, not only are products fed onto subdomain, there are a handfull of other domains which list the products - again, the content (text and images) is exactly the same: other.com/product/name.html Would I be best placed to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of the product pages on other domains, pointing to the original product page on the actual TLD? Does rel cannonical work across domains? Would the product pages with a rel cannonical tag in the header still rank? Let me know if there is a better solution all-round!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
Thinking about not indexing PDFs on a product page
Our product pages generate a PDF version of the page in a different layout. This is done for 2 reasons, it's been the standard across similar industries and to help customers print them when working with the product. So there is a use when it comes to the customer but search? I've thought about this a lot and my thinking is why index the PDF at all? Only allow the HTML page to be indexed. The PDF files are in a subdomain, so I can easily no index them. The way I see it, I'm reducing duplicate content On the flip side, it is hosted in a subdomain, so the PDF appearing when a HTML page doesn't, is another way of gaining real estate. If it appears with the HTML page, more estate coverage. Anyone else done this? My knowledge tells me this could be a good thing, might even iron out any backlinks from being generated to the PDF and lead to more HTML backlinks Can PDFs solely exist as a form of data accessible once on the page and not relevant to search engines. I find them a bane when they are on a subdomain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Page and Domain Authority
How much Page and Domain Authority we need to look for to secure a backlink.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ross254sidney0 -
Wise or cluttery for a website? Should our "out of the mainstream" of popular products be listed on our site? (older/discontinued, umfamiliar brands, parts to products, etc...)
For instance, should we list replacement parts for a music stand? Or parts for a trumpet, like a valve button? To some, this seems like a cluttery thing to do. I suppose another way to ask would be, "Should we only list the high quantity selling items that are well branded and that everyone shops for, and leave the rest off the website for instore customers only to buy?" (FYI: Our website focus is for our local market mainly, and we're not trying to take on the world per-say, but if the world wants in, that's cool too.) (My thought here is that if a customer walks into our retail store and they request an odd ball part or item... we go hunting for it and find it for them. Or perhaps another Music Store needs a part? To me, it's ALL for sale,... right? Our retail depth, should be reflected in our online presence as much as possible,... correct? I'd personally choose to list the odd balls on our site, just as if a customer was standing in the store. Another side thought is, if we only list the main stream products... we are basically lessening our content (which could affect our rankings) and would be inviting ourselves into a higher competitive market place because we wouldn't be saying anything different than what most other music store sites out there say. I believe we need to show off our uniqueness,... and product depth (of course w/good SEO & content too) is really kinda it, aside of course also from good expert people and a large facility. But perhaps that's a wrong way to look at it?) Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_McLeish0 -
There seems to be something obvious stopping our product pages from being listed in organic results - help!
Hello All Firstly new to SEO MOZ but what a fantastic resource, good work! I help run a platform at ethical community (dot) com (have phrased it like that so google doesn't pick up this thread hope thats ok). We seem to have something glaringly obvious with the SEO ability of our product pages. We now have over 7000 products on the site and would like to think we have done a pretty good job in terms of optimisning them, lots of nice keywords, relevant page titles, good internal links, and even recently have reduced the loading speeds a fair amount. We have a sitemap set up feeding in URLS to Google and some of them are now nearly a year old. The problem, when doing an EXACT google search on a product title the product pages dont show up for the majority of the 7000 products. HOWEVER.... we get fantastic ranking in google products, and get sales through other areas of the site, which seems even more odd. For example, if you type in "segway" you'll see us ranking on the first page of google in google products, but the product page itself is nowhere to be seen. For example "DARK CHOCOLATE STRANDS 70G CAKE DECORATION" gets no results on google (aside from google products) when we have this page at OURDOMAIN/eco-shop/food/dark-chocolate-strands-70g-cake-decoration-5592 Can anyone help identify if there is a major bottleneck here our gut feeling is there is one major factor that is causing this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ethicalcommunity0