I have a client whose shop will be down a few days. What would provide less impact to organic search program?
-
I have a client who is moving their warehouse, and their shop will be down for four days. I have been doing some research on the best ways to handle this and I wanted to get the communities feedback on this. One thought is to have the pages live, but people can't place an order - but this does not provide the best customer experience. Another thought is to just do temporary redirects for the shop pages, to land on the "sorry we are moving" page for customers. Another thought was to do 503 HTTP status codes on the pages and then do a temporary redirect to the landing page.
Have any of you experienced this issue? If so, what did you do to minimize the impact to the organic search programs?
NOTE: All of their static content will remain in tact. Only the shop/store will be down.
-
Remembered seeing this back in the day,
Matt Cutts Take,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eYJuT0yGrI&list=UUWf2ZlNsCGDS89VBF_awNvA
I should think you will be fine for just 4 days,
James
-
This is a large consumer brand, so it isn't a handful of people - but let me chat with them about their communication plan. Not sure what they are doing from a customer experience perspective and it would be good to note. Thank you!
So you vote with having the pages live and not order, rather than a redirect... Even for a large consumer brand?
Thanks!
-
Due to the limitations in their system (see my response to Bruce above) I have no say in having inventory or not. But, one of the options is to have all the product pages live and no option to purchase. Possibly putting a banner on the top explaining what is happening... Maybe that is a better option the the temporary redirects... I just don't know.
-
Sure! It is a large brand that has a warehouse system and inventory system hooked into its website. By moving the warehouse, they must take the shop offline. That is just a fact I have to deal with. It is not a decision I can make or can influence. But, I can influence how it is taken offline.
I can't agree more on the "give us a few extra days" solution, but their inventory system (which is hooked into its website) can't do it. Otherwise they lose their data. I don't get it, but that is the way it is...
Thanks!
-
I would personally vote for having the pages live and either not being able to place an order (with a message), or have them be able to place an order but have a message saying things will be delayed. Totally depending on your client's type of business and customers, they could also do an email or blog post or note on their home page warning people in advance of the downtime.
My husband runs a small business, and many things are custom-manufactured by us. It's a small, niche industry, and many of the people know each other. There are only a handful of forums devoted to the hobby. We had a period where we were effectively shut down for a couple of months, due to a fire at the location we were using, followed by moving. We did a blog post on our site, and then posted on all the forums letting people know what was up and that orders would be delayed. I did take the shopping cart icons off the site at that point so that people couldn't order. Thankfully, people were fairly understanding.
-
We have moved our place of business a couple of times. Big job. Everyone has also been out of the office for a conference.
Method 1) Move on Friday and have it done by Monday... maybe you can pick a three day weekend. Have a big sale on your bulky items for a couple weeks before the move. GET SOME SHELVES EMPTY. Place restocking order with supplier so that it arrives at your new location early in the week after your move.
Start moving all nonessential items on Thursday, anything that you can get out of there. Leave only what pack-and-ship people need to operate on Friday at the old location. Get minimal furniture and computers in the new location and operating on Thursday. Get empty inventory shelving at the new location ready to accept inventory. Take anything to the new location that you can.
On Friday, pack-and-ship people arrive early and get all orders picked and packed and shipped. As soon as pack-and-ship people are finished the moving team yanks their furniture and supplies and takes it to new location.Pack inventory in boxes and move shelving to new location before inventory. LABEL THE BOXES WITH SHELF NUMBERS.
Friday night, Saturday and Sunday moving team gets all shelving, inventory, and pack-and-ship supplies and furniture set up at new location. Pack-and-ship people work during the weekend to get the inventory back on the shelves as they want it. Don't let the moving crew do this or pack-and-ship people will be cussing.
Monday morning, pack-and-ship people are ready to go, starting a little early so they have extra time to be ready for your package pickup people. Pay overtime and a nice bonus for everyone's hard work.
- Method 2)... place a big face-slapping sign on every page of your site and even bigger in the checkout. "We are moving to a new location. Please feel free to shop but know that orders will not ship until (fill in date)."
-
I would agree with Bruce in that unless this is a "must have tomorrow" industry, it might be best to leave everything as is and add something that tells your customers that you're down for a few days. Why not throw up a banner on every product page that says something like "we're moving to serve you better - so orders may be delayed for a few days more than normal". We did something similar when we moved and most customers understood.
Good Luck
Ken
-
Not sure of all the facts so very hard to make a call on what to do.
Initial thoughts:- Why is moving warehouse stopping ordering? If this is because you cannot ship fast enough, extend your lead time to ship to cover these days.
To recreate an old phrase of "Out of stock is out of business" to "Offline is out of business"....if a customer makes the effort to get to the site and then cannot buy, what is stopping this and is the reason really really valid. Can you give a few more details about what why and how come?
Warmest regards
Bruce
-
Yes, I read that one. Figured it was a few years old and maybe there was another solution available.
Thanks!
-
Here's a blog post from a couple of years ago that talks about that and should be helpful in your situation. http://moz.com/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance
Best of luck!
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
-
Will duplicate product information paragraphs negatively impact our site?
We are selling paint and have separate pages for different colour cans, each with their own unique description. We would like to include a few additional paragraphs of product information below each description, but this will be identical across all the products. Do you think this will be a problem being duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | JWalmsVH2 -
Errors In Search Console
Hi All, I am hoping someone might be able to help with this. Last week one of my sites dropped from mid first day to bottom of page 1. We had not been link building as such and it only seems to of affected a single search term and the ranking page (which happens to be the home page). When I was going through everything I went to search console and in crawl errors there are 2 errors that showed up as detected 3 days before the drop. These are: wp-admin/admin-ajax.php showing as response code 400 and also xmlrpc.php showing as response code 405 robots.txt is as follows: user-agent: * disallow: /wp-admin/ allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Any help with what is wrong here and how to fix it would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon0 -
Organic Traffic Dropped By Half
My company website (https://factoryexpodirect.com/) organic traffic is dropped in March 2017 and after that it never recovered. I am not sure what is the reason. Can anyone help me out to figure out the reason.
Technical SEO | | christmaslaserlights0 -
Google Search Results Flip-Flop
For a site we manage, Google can’t seem to decide which of two pages to present for a search for “skid steer attachments.” Almost weekly, it flip-flops from the home page to an interior page (which is a shopping cart category page that we have not actually optimized for the phrase.) The site is berlon.com. Have any of you had a similar experience and, if so, how did you address it? I’ve attached a Moz screen shot that shows the changes. mNfmJoY
Technical SEO | | PKI_Niles0 -
Title in google organic display
The title (top link) in my organic result in google search has my page title then a dash and another keyword. This keyword is not related to the search result. It may discourage clicks. Where does google get that and how can i change it? For example: Page Title - unrelated keyword
Technical SEO | | bhsiao
url
link description0 -
Notice of DMCA removal from Google Search
Dear Mozer's Today I get from Google Webmaster tools a "Notice of DMCA removal" I'll paste here the note to get your opinions "Hello, Google has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that some of your materials allegedly infringe upon the copyrights of others. The URLs of the allegedly infringing materials may be found at the end of this message. The affected URLs are listed below: http://www.freesharewaredepot.com/productpages/Ultimate_Spelling__038119.asp" So I perform these steps: 1. Remove the page from the site (now it gives 404). 2. Remove it from database (no listed on directory, sitemap.xml and RSS) 3. I fill the "Google Content Removed Notification form" detailing the removal of the page. My question is now I have to do any other task, such as fill a site reconsideration, or only I have to wait. Thank you for your help. Claudio
Technical SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
New Site Search Critique
Hi I am a huge fan of the SEOMOZ site and this great community which has helped me learn the current SEO skills I have now which are still very basic compared to the pros on the forum. I have tried to follow best practice regarding onsite and technical seo when developing my new site www.cheapfindergames.com and I would really appreciate it if experts on the forum could spare a minute to critique the site from a search perspective please This will give any elements of what onsite and technical SEO I done well and what aspects still need work. I am currently trying to build quality links and social mentions into the site which will take time, and the site has been designed around usability and conversions. Many Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
What Google uses in search result descriptions
Recently, Google has started including certain information from our web pages in their search results description that is a bit puzzling. For example if you google 'Wedding Band Raleigh' the description they are using for our site's (GigMasters) page begins with the text 'Results 1 - 10 of 1005' Not sure why they are pulling that information. That is in on the page but its not high up on the page or marked with any special h1, h2, or h3 tag. We do have that information inside of a div which we have named 'Results'. Maybe that's why? Did we inadvertently use some sort of Google rich snippet or schema.org naming convention?! Any insight would be hugely appreciated.
Technical SEO | | gigmasters0