Approach for discontinued categories and products
-
My web site previously offered several categories of an indoor type of product, which have since been permanently discontinued. We do still offer a full line of the outdoor type of these products. The usage is quite different (indoor vs. outdoor), and customers looking for the indoor variety are not likely to be immediately interested in the outdoor ones. But the pages for the discontinued categories and products have built up significant page authority and rank quite well even for more generic searches which are not indoor or outdoor specific. I am interested in opinions on what approach to take for the discontinued category pages and product pages.
Currently, the discontinued pages are accessible by direct link, but have been removed from the site's navigation menus and on-site search. The pages include some messaging for visitors to inform that we no longer offer this type of product, with some links to active categories.
We can remove these pages and serve a 404 error page. Or, we can redirect these pages to the outdoor product category (but all would have to be redirected to a single category, as the specific outdoor categories and products don't map logically to specific indoor ones). Or, we can keep as-is.
I am interested in opinions on approach, either between these options above, or other alternatives.
-
Hi there,
You have kind of answered your own question in my opinion.
"The usage is quite different (indoor vs. outdoor)" & "the specific outdoor categories and products don't map logically to specific indoor ones"
You only want to be redirecting if the location is useful to the customer. Thinking "i dont want to loose the authority i've built up", whilst a valid chain of thought doesn't mean you should redirect it somewhere for the sake of it
I would personally take 1 of 3 approaches
- Find a suitable replacement line of products from another supplier so you have somewhere valid to sent the customers
- 404 the pages and accept you no longer offer a service that users searching for this phrase would find useful
- Write an informative article / piece on the subject, highlighting the possible use of an outdoor version instead of the indoor as a place-holder piece of content or permanent replacement until new content can be sourced.
Some may disagree but thats what I would do
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
-
Quickview product modal - should I add rel=canonical to each URL ?
I have a quick view modal for all products on my website. How should I deal with these in the page set up eg. should I rel=canonical to the full product page and no-index in robots txt or are they ok in Googles eyes as they are part of the UX ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColesNathan0 -
Productontology URLs are 404 erroring, are there alternatives to denote new schema categories?
Our team QA specialist recently noticing that the class identifier URLs via productontology are 404ing out saying that the "There is no Wikipedia article for (particular property)". They are even 404ing for productontology URLs that are examples on the productontology.com website! Example: http://www.productontology.org/id/Apple The 404 page says that the wiki entry for "Apple" doesn't exist (lol) Does anybody know what is going on with this website? This service was extremely helpful for creating additionalType categories for schema categories that don't exist on schema.org. Are there any alternatives to productontology now that these class identifier URLs are 404ing? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Two Domains, Same Products/Content
We're an e-commerce company with two domains. One is our original company name/domain, one is a newer top-level domain. The older domain doesn't receive as much traffic but is still searched and used by long-time customers who are loyal to that brand, who we don't want to alienate. The sites are both identical in products and content, which creates a duplicate content issue. I have come across two options so far: 1. a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one. 2. Optimize the content on the newer domain (the strongest of the two) and leave the older domain content as is. Does anyone know of a solution better than the two I listed above or have experience resolving a similar problem in the past?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ilewis0 -
We have set up our H1 to contain the product name - it used to be our Company name all the time - would this affect our sales
We noticed recently on our site - that our H1 tag was the Company Name - we changed this to be the product name - our products would be searched for by all or part of the description. Our sales have dropped of the days since we changed it, could it be a result of this change ? Is it best to have the H1 tag as the product name ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
H2 vs. H3 Tags for Category Navigation
Hey, all. I have client that uses tags in the navigation for its blog. For example, tags might appear around "Library," "Recent Posts," etc. This is handled through their WordPress theme. This seems fairly standard, but I wonder whether tags are semantically appropriate. Since each blog post is fairly lengthy (about 500-1000 words) with multiple tags, would it be more appropriate to use tags for this menu navigation? Are we cutting into the effectiveness of our tags by using them for menu navigation? The navigation is certainly an important page element, and it structures content, so it seems that it should use some header tag. Anyways, your thoughts are greatly appreciated. I'm a content creator, not an SEO, so this is a bit out of my skillset.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ask44435230 -
How would you target three synonymous phrases for the same product?
I have a site that I'm working on that sells waste oil heaters, and I'm beginning to run into an issue. As one would assume, our primary keyword phrase is "waste oil heaters" for which we're doing rather well. The issue is that there are two other phrases that are directly synonymous to our primary term that users are actively searching for (i.e. the product can accurate be called three different things). Phrases are listed below w/ phrase match search volumes "waste oil heater" - 6600 "waste oil burner" - 2400 "waste oil furnace" - 1900 I'm not one who likes to engage in trying to "trick" anything, so I'm fairly opposed to listing all three of these in the title tag or something similar. This is being done by our competitors, but only one outranks us as this point for the primary phrase. My initial thoughts are that we should be targeting our home page and category page for "waste oil heater(s)", and then lightly pepper our content with the use of these synonyms. Then from there we can focus on other term variations w/ our blog posts and try to vary up the anchor text coming into the site when we launch link building. What do you guys think? Have you guys been a situation like this with three phrases describing the same product? I appreciate any feedback or advice. Thanks guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CaddisInteractive0 -
Is it worth re-doing SEO for all existent products
We have a website and when we started, we had no clue about SEO, nor did we really understand the full extent of CRO amongst other things. We have slowly learnt that there are many changes that need to happen to our site; however...do we need to re SEO all the content that is already on the website or can we purely start a fresh with the new products we feed through? The website is: www.onlineforequine.co.uk if you need to take a look at the kind of platform we are working with.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlineforequine0 -
Organising Blog categories for SEO and usability.
Hello! I'm a professional photographer and have used categories in an old blog to separate my work. (weddings, portraits, etc.) I'm starting an new blog and everything was imported, except categories so as i started rewriting them, I noticed the 'personalised URL. So I was thinking of re-writing my categories based on types of jobs and location. For example: *North Wales -wedding photography -portrait photography -commercial photography *Cheshire -wedding photography -portrait photography -commercial photography and so on... Or do you think it's best to just have shoot style categories? What do you guys think? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IoanSaid0