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
-
301 redirection help needed!
Hi all, So if we used to have a domain (let's say olddomain.com) and we had a new site created at newdomain.com how do we properly setup redirects page to page. Caveat, the urls have changed so for instance the old page oldomain.com/service is now newdomain.com/our-services on the new site. Do we need to have hosting on the old site? Do we need to setup individual 301s for each page corresponding to the new page? Just looking for the easiest way to do this CORRECTLY. Thanks, Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley3 -
Coupon websites as affiliates
We recently started using shareasale.com for affiliate marketing and have received literally hundreds of applications from coupon websites wanting to become affiliates. Most we have not approved as the quality of the sites is poor. However, a few sites seem more legitimate. Could having these types of sites harm our seo in any way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unikey1 -
Site migration - 301 or 404 for pages no longer needed?
Hi I am migrating from my old website to a new one on a different, server with a very different domain and url structure. I know it's is best to change as little as possible but I just wasn't able to do that. Many of my pages can be redirected to new urls with similar or the same content. My old site has around 400 pages. Many of these pages/urls are no longer required on the new site - should I 404 these pages or 301 them to the homepage? I have looked through a lot of info online to work this out but cant seem to find a definative answer. Thanks for this!! James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Curran0 -
How to ask customers to +1 the page of the service/product they used and liked on Google+ of website
What format to use (how to write) to ask customers to +1 the page of the service/product they used and liked on Google+?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MasonBaker0 -
How to 301 redirect all URLs with /? in?
I want to redirect all URLs that have /? in it. Indexed in Google is a bunch of urls lik: mysite.com/?674764 mysite.com/?rtf8y78 I want all these URLs to be redirected to my home page. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Removing hundreds of old product pages - Best process
Hi guys, I've got a site about discounts/specials etc. A few months ago we decided it might be useful to have shop specials in PDF documents "pulled" and put on the site individually so that people could find the specials easily. This resulted in over 2000 new pages being added to the site over a few weeks (there are lots of specials).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cashchampion
However, 2 things have happened: 1 - we have decided to go in another direction with the site and are no longer doing this
2 - the specials that were uploaded have now ended but the pages are still live Google has indexed these pages already. What would be the best way to "deal" with these pages? Do I just delete them, do I 301 them to the home page? PS the site is build on wordpress. Any ideas as I am at a complete loss. Thanks,
Marc0 -
Quoestion about 301 redirect
Hey, I have interesting questions regardin 301 redirect (At least I think it's Interesting:) ) So i have this websites that compares different lenders, url below 🙂 If you go to the homepage then the first thing you see is different loan amounts in 50-99 euro range. Also you can check out different loan amounts like 100-149€, 150-199€, 200-249€ and so on. For now i have used 301 redirect and Noindex and Nofollow for all the different "loan amounts" urls. Examples below etc Is it a good idea to use 301 on all such pages to point to the homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TauriU0 -
Redirect Chains - Accept the 301 chain or link from the original page??
Hi everyone, I have a client that re-launched his site and it's gone from 100 pages to 1000 (new languages/increased product pages etc) We've used 301's to map the old site to the new database driven site. BUT the new site is creating extremely long URL's: e.g. www.example.com/example_example_example/example_example_example_example Obviously I want to change these URL's: THE PROBLEM..... I am worried about the Chain Redirects. I know two 301 redirects is okay (although it's not great), but I wonder if there is an alternative: When I've implemented the new URL structure the chain will look like this: www.oldsite.com 301 redirects to www.newsitewithdodgyurls.com which then 301 redirects to www.mynewsitewithgreaturls.com Seeing as the new site has only been live for a month, and hasn't really gained many external links, should I: 301 from the original site (www.oldsite.com) straight to the new site (www.mynewsitewithgreaturls.com)? If so, what would I do with the pages that I have not redirected? Let them 404? OR Leave the 301 chain in place? Your advice, and any other suggestions would be much appreciated Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesjackson0