Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How big is the problem: 404-errors as result of out of stock products?
-
We had a discussion about the importance of 404-errors as result of products which are out of stock. Of course this is not good, but what is the leverance in terms of importance: low-medium-high?
-
They are mostly permanently out of stock / out of collection. Based on research and your reactions we want to 301 redirect them to the relevant category page. The number of 404 errors in webmaster tools are quite substancial.
The ones which are not permanently out of stock but temporarily unavailable we want to maintain the product page with a comment that the product will be orderable soon.
-
A few questions need to be answered. Primarily:
- Are these coming back in stock?
- Were these popular products?
If these products are coming back in stock, this is a big problem and you need to have your team work to find a solution to have these pages maintain a 200. You could be losing your spot in the rankings every time you run out of inventory, missing out on a lot of traffic and cross-selling opportunities.
If the products are gone and not coming back, this isn't a big problem, as it is something every e-comm deals with. Having a plan to handle this is important though.
Some basic options include:
- Keep out of stock product pages active on web, serving up a 200. Be sure the content is updated clearly to show that the item is Out of Stock and it also serves up a bunch of additional, closely related alternative
- Let the removed products 404. Redirect these URLs to the parent subcategory level. This is possible for sites with a moderate amount of SKUs and low turnover.
- Let the removed products 404. Hand pick the popular products to set-up 301 redirects for to subcategory or similar product. Maintain by watching 404s in Google Webmaster Tools, looking for 404 pages in OSE/ahrefs, etc.
-
Are the products discontinued or out of stock? In my opinion, the 404 errors are only detrimental to your SEO when they are in an overabundance. Relevant 404 errors are important, not just for Google, but for the searcher as well. They need to know that a product has been discontinued. If a product is just out of stock, I wouldn't 404 it at all.
This is a video by Matt Cutts on how Google handles 404 errors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oya9Pl7ukNo
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
-
What do you do with product pages that are no longer used ? Delete/redirect to category/404 etc
We have a store with thousands of active items and thousands of sold items. Each product is unique so only one of each. All products are pinned and pushed online ... and then they sell and we have a product page for a sold item. All products are keyword researched and often can rank well for longtail keywords Would you :- 1. delete the page and let it 404 (we will get thousands) 2. See if the page has a decent PA, incoming links and traffic and if so redirect to a RELEVANT category page ? ~(again there will be thousands) 3. Re use the page for another product - for example a sold ruby ring gets replaces with ta new ruby ring and we use that same page /url for the new item. Gemma
Technical SEO | | acsilver0 -
Subdomain 403 error
Hi Everyone, A crawler from our SEO tool detects a 403 error from a link from our main domain to a a couple of subdomains. However, these subdomains are perfect accessibly. What could be the problem? Is this error caused by the server, the crawlbot or something else? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
Jens0 -
How do I customize Magento product urls?
I would like my product urls to be /category/manufacturer/name/part#. This would be the only url the item uses and how the product is accessed. It would also be used for product feeds. My first attempt was to use https://amasty.com/magento-unique-product-url.html This creates a single url but I can not customize it. Sometimes it selects the manufacturer and sometimes the category. My second attempt was with https://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/custom-product-urls-seo.html I have it installed but it doesn't change the urls. Has anyone been able to do this successfully?
Technical SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Duplicate content and 404 errors
I apologize in advance, but I am an SEO novice and my understanding of code is very limited. Moz has issued a lot (several hundred) of duplicate content and 404 error flags on the ecommerce site my company takes care of. For the duplicate content, some of the pages it says are duplicates don't even seem similar to me. additionally, a lot of them are static pages we embed images of size charts that we use as popups on item pages. it says these issues are high priority but how bad is this? Is this just an issue because if a page has similar content the engine spider won't know which one to index? also, what is the best way to handle these urls bringing back 404 errors? I should probably have a developer look at these issues but I wanted to ask the extremely knowledgeable Moz community before I do 🙂
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
Canonical for duplicate pages in ecommerce site and the product out of stock
I’m an SEO for an ecommerce site that sells shoes I have duplicate pages for different colors of the same product (unique URL for each color), Conventionally I have added canonical tags for each page, which direct to a specific product URL My question is what happens when a product which the googlbot is direct to, is out of stock but is still listed in the canonical tag ?
Technical SEO | | shoesonline0 -
Is Google suppressing a page from results - if so why?
UPDATE: It seems the issue was that pages were accessible via multiple URLs (i.e. with and without trailing slash, with and without .aspx extension). Once this issue was resolved, pages started ranking again. Our website used to rank well for a keyword (top 5), though this was over a year ago now. Since then the page no longer ranks at all, but sub pages of that page rank around 40th-60th. I searched for our site and the term on Google (i.e. 'Keyword site:MySite.com') and increased the number of results to 100, again the page isn't in the results. However when I just search for our site (site:MySite.com) then the page is there, appearing higher up the results than the sub pages. I thought this may be down to keyword stuffing; there were around 20-30 instances of the keyword on the page, however roughly the same quantity of keywords were on each sub pages as well. I've now removed some of the excess keywords from all sections as it was getting in the way of usability as well, but I just wanted some thoughts on whether this is a likely cause or if there is something else I should be worried about.
Technical SEO | | Datel1 -
Google's "cache:" operator is returning a 404 error.
I'm doing the "cache:" operator on one of my sites and Google is returning a 404 error. I've swapped out the domain with another and it works fine. Has anyone seen this before? I'm wondering if G is crawling the site now? Thx!
Technical SEO | | AZWebWorks0 -
403 forbidden, are these a problem?
Hi I have just run a crawl test on screaming frog and it is showing quite a few 403 forbidden status codes. We are showing none of these in webmaster tools, is this an issue?
Technical SEO | | jtay1230