Using Temporary Redirects for Ecommerce Categories?
-
Hi
I'm currently going over old category pages for an ecommerce website, and I'm trying to work out the best way of handling old pages. I will be setting up 301s for the majority of pages, as these are 100% dead and gone. I'm struggling a bit with certain pages though, whereby the category is empty but there is always the possibility that our buyers will purchase these products again in the future (or they might not, there's no way to tell). I know that this isn't what a 302 is for, but I'm wondering which would be better in this case: to create a 302 redirect or to do a full 301 and if the products are repurchased at a later date to create a whole new url.
Hope that makes sense.
Thanks,
Kate
-
Hi Kate
I work with a lot of eCommerce companies and when a category is essentially in limbo - between seasons where stock may be re-bought then I keep it live. To simply redirect to another unrelated page is not, in my opinion the best result for the customer.
If a customer is searching for Levis (just an example) and you don't have any then why would he want to end up on a generic Jeans page or another brand? The best result is that they see you are out of stock. You could even just put a message on that page saying - Sold Out - stock arriving soon or something like that. (Get the buying plans off the buyers! - they know what is on order for the next 6-9 months!)
The page will remain and get repopulated once stock arrives. If the category is simply out of stock never to return then I would consider redirecting to a higher category - but if it was a brand I may still leave the page as being sold out. (The alternative here is to allow it to 404 so the page disappears all together from SERPs - but then style your 404 page so that they can follow a menu of alternatives).
The last thing you want is a potential customer going round in circles trying to find the brand because you have redirect them somewhere else. So a message like 'We are out of stock of Levis right now but check out these other awesome brands - with a menu' is perfectly fine and a better User Experience (UX)
By creating the best UX you are far more likely to please your buyers and frankly a few pages of skinny content is not going to kill you in SERPS - you have a perfectly valid reason.
Watch Rand's video on alternative methods but I would do this.
Regards
Nigel
-
I'm not sure if I follow the "empty pages for which the client would purchase something" part. Are you referring to the site owner's company to purchase stock for those pages?
-
Hi Andy,
Thanks for that! All I'm getting from it is that I should just do a 301. I'm guessing there isn't the functionality anywhere for a page that may or may not come back.
-
Hey Kate,
The guys here @ Moz actually have a really awesome "whiteboard Friday" video on this exact topic, which pretty much covers everything and is much better explained than I could ever interpret it...so...here you go: https://moz.com/blog/rel-canonical
Have a nice weekend!
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
-
Redirect chain being flagged in Moz
I have a redirect chain being flagged in Moz, this is the first time I have come across this, and Im convinced its causing an issue, the site is performing very badly. I have attached screen grabs of the redirect chain. and the site is cotswold flat roofing Is this redirect chain causing me an issue, and what is the best practice for getting it fixed or removed, the site currenly does not even show up in Google even when searching for its won brand, I removed an x robot noindex a week ago, and now the only issue that I can see is this redirect chain 6pOpGNU
Technical SEO | | Donsimong0 -
301 Redirect Expert
I have hired two website people from odesk and had bad experience in 301 redirects. One never got it done and the other cause my website to crash on a 500 error code, he load all the redirects in a script on .htaccess on my wordpress site on godaddy, there were 1400 redirect.Can somebody recommend a expert for my redirect problem.
Technical SEO | | tjacquet0 -
Categories and rel canonical
Hello everyone, I have a doubt in how to approach this problem. I have a local business website, and i want to rank this website for our main KW. So the idea is to rank the main Keyword to the home page www.sitename.com At the same time we blog every week and one of the categories is the same has the main Keyword. It makes sense because the majority of the blog posts are about it. In a certain way the homepage and the category page are competing for the same keyword. How can i approach this problem? Should i use rel canonical in the category page, pointing to the homepage? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | Barbio0 -
Holy Redirects
Currently working on a project for a medium sized site (http://sleeponcall.com/) but the SEOMoz crawl crawled over 14,000 pages because the report is showing more than 8,000 redirects. The client has no clue how this happened as their previous web programmers may not have been on the ball. What could be causing the problem and what is the best way to untangle this mess?
Technical SEO | | Nobody15330770827560 -
.EDU via a 301 Redirect?
I recently received a link to my website from an .edu. However, the way they configured it was they pointed the link to one of their internal pages and then made that page 301 to my website. Is there anyway to gain any link juice from that sort of link?
Technical SEO | | gundogs0 -
Technical question about site structure using a CMS, redirects, and canonical tag
I have a couple of sites using a particular CMS that creates all of the pages under a content folder, including the home page. So the url is www.example.com/content/default.asp. There is a default.asp in the root directory that redirects to the default page in the content folder using a response.redirect statement and it’s considered a 302 redirect. So all incoming urls, i.e. www.example.com and example.com and www.example.com/ will go to the default.asp which then redirects to www.example.com/ content/default.asp. How does this affect SEO? Should the redirect be a 301? And whether it’s a 301 or a 302, can we have a rel=canonical tag on the page that that is rel=www.example.com? Or does that create some sort of loop? I’ve inherited several sites that use this CMS and need to figure out the best way to handle it.
Technical SEO | | CHutchins1 -
What should be use 301 or 302 redirection for 404 pages
Please suggest which redirection we should use for 404 pages- 301 or 302. If you can elaborate it with reason then it will be highly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | koamit0 -
Https redirect
Hi there, a client of mine is asking me if Google would penalize to redirect from all the http urls to https (they want to change the security protocol). I assume it is going to work as a classic 301, right? so they might lose some authority in they way, but I am not 100% sure. Can anyone confirm this? does anyone has a similar experience? thanks a lot!
Technical SEO | | elisainteractive0