Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. What do you do with product pages that are no longer used ? Delete/redirect to category/404 etc

    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.

    What do you do with product pages that are no longer used ? Delete/redirect to category/404 etc

    Technical SEO
    2
    4
    950
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • acsilver
      acsilver Subscriber last edited by

      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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • R0bin_L0rd
        R0bin_L0rd @acsilver last edited by

        No worries, glad to help. Good luck!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • acsilver
          acsilver Subscriber @R0bin_L0rd last edited by

          Sorry for the delayed reply. Many thanks for your email and nice to hear someone who has thoughts like my own. We are going to do a combination of letting some pages 404, redirect some to categories and reuse those that rank well for similar products.

          R0bin_L0rd 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • R0bin_L0rd
            R0bin_L0rd last edited by

            Hi Gemma, interesting question! I'd consider a few things;

            1. While the product pages rank well for long-tail keywords, are they driving much organic traffic or, more importantly, organic revenue from people landing on the page?
            2. If it's possible to reuse the pages for new products - what are the downsides?
            3. What would the best user experience be for out-of-stock products? How similar are the new ones to the old ones?

            In terms of question 1, if these product pages are numerous enough to be a source of concern, I'd want to know if you're getting any benefit out of them being indexed. If not then removing them from the index could be a simple solution and would help avoid things like searchers landing on an out-of-stock product. E-commerce clients of mine have often found that organic conversion rate for sessions landing directly on product pages tends to be worse because it's relying on the visitor wanting pretty much exactly that product to be interested whereas category pages can show off more of the range.

            In terms of 2, if it's an option to reuse the existing product pages, why have you shied away from doing that until now? If you have new products which are similar enough to the old products that means users coming to the page are more likely to get what they want (rather than just being redirected to the category page, or hitting an out-of-stock or 404 page). Also, if each product is keyword researched and the products are similar enough, presumably new products will be competing with old ones for similar long tail keywords?

            If neither 1 or 2 work, I'd focus on what I'd want as a user. It can be frustrating to land on a 404 page, either through search or on the website, but it can also be frustrating and confusing to be redirected straight to a category page or similar product. Maybe the user would want to see the out-of-stock page with the option of being taken to similar products? Again for me it'd come down to how much you think each of these unique products could fulfil similar criteria for the visitor.

            Hope that helps, as you may have picked up from my response I don't think there is one universal right answer but there is likely a best for your site. Happy to discuss further

            acsilver 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • iHasco

              Getting rid of pagination - redirect all paginated pages or leave them to 404?

              Hi all, We're currently in the process of updating our website and we've agreed that one of the things we want to do is get rid of all our pagination (currently used on the blog and product review areas) and instead implement load more on scroll. The question I have is... should we redirect all of the paginated pages and if so, where to? (My initial thoughts were either to the blog homepage or to the archive page) OR do we leave them to just 404? Bear in mind we have thousands of paginated pages 😕 Here's our blog area btw - https://www.ihasco.co.uk/blog  Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

              Technical SEO | | iHasco
              0
            • A_Fotografy

              Yoast SEO. After set up 404 error pages

              Hello all, Something strange happened with my blog site. I recently signed to MOZ tools. Initially everything was fine, but during my last crawl I got loads of 404
              pages. Few days ago I was tweaking some settings in SEO plugin according to this post https://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success What I noticed was that 404 pages were coming from my blog posts, but for
              some reason category was missing in those posts. For example this link is 404
              https://a-fotografy.co.uk/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie The one with category is https://a-fotografy.co.uk/wedding-pictures/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie/ So basically for some reason category was missing. Please let me know how can I fix this instead of doing hundreds of
              redirects now. Thank you,
              Regards,
              Armands

              Technical SEO | | A_Fotografy
              0
            • the-gate-films

              URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?

              I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.

              Technical SEO | | the-gate-films
              0
            • richdan

              How do I redirect the Author archive page in Wordpress?

              If you do a search for my name on Google, the first result is the author archive page of my Wordpress blog. I would like to redirect the author page to my  "about me" page but cannot add a 301 as the author page is created dynamically in Wordpress. Anyone know how I can do this?

              Technical SEO | | richdan
              0
            • Digital-DMG

              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?

              Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG
              0
            • RoxBrock

              Do I use /es/, /mx/ or /es-mx/ for my Spanish site for Mexico only

              I currently have the Spanish version of my site under myurl.com/es/ When I was at Pubcon in Vegas last year a panel reviewed my site and said the Spanish version should be in /mx/ rather than /es/ since es is for Spain only and my site is for Mexico only. Today while trying to find information on the web I found /es-mx/ as a possibility. I am changing my site and was planning to change to /mx/ but want confirmation on the correct way to do this. Does anyone have a link to Google documentation that will tell me for sure what to use here? The documentation I read led me to the /es/ but I cannot find that now.

              Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
              0
            • TOMMarketingLtd.

              Home Page .index.htm and .com Duplicate Page Content/Title

              I have been whittling away at the duplicate content on my clients' sites, thanks to SEOmoz's pro report, and have been getting push back from the account manager at register.com (the site was built here and the owner doesn't want to move it).  He says these are the exact same page and he can't access one to redirect to the other.  Any suggestions? The SEOmoz report says there is duplicate content on both these urls: Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/ Your help is greatly appreciated! Sheryl

              Technical SEO | | TOMMarketingLtd.
              0
            • 5225Marketing

              How to handle sitemap with pages using query strings?

              Hi, I'm working to optimize a site that currently has about 5K pages listed in the sitemap.  There are not in face this many pages.  Part of the problem is that one of the pages is a tool where each sort and filter button produces a query string URL. It seems to me inefficient to have so many items listed that are all really the same page.  Not to mention wanting to avoid any duplicate content or low quality issues. How have you found it best to handle this?  Should I just noindex each of the links?  Canonical links? Should I manually remove the pages from the sitemap?  Should I continue as is? Thanks a ton for any input you have!

              Technical SEO | | 5225Marketing
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.