What are best SEO practices for product pages of unique items when the item is no longer available?
-
Hello, my company sells used cars though a website.
Each vehicle page contains photos and details of the unit, but once the vehicle is sold, all the contents are replaced by a simple text like "this vehicle is not available anymore".
Title of the page also change to a generic one.
URL remains the same.I doubt this is the correct way of doing, but I cannot understand what method would be better.
The improvement I am considering for pages of no longer available vehicles is this:
keep the page alive but with reduced vehicle details, a text like: this vehicles is not available anymore and automatic recommendations for similar items.
What do you think? Is this a good practice or do you suggest anything different?
Also, should I put a NOINDEX tag on the expired vehicles pages?
Thank you in advance for your help.
-
Dear Oznappies, Sheldon, James, thank you very much.
I will try to proceed as follows:
keep the vehicle page with minimum information, indicate that the the item is sold and show links to similar and related vehicles that the customer might find interesting. Also, I'll put NOINDEX tag on the page (I prefer the search engine to send users to pages of items that are available).
Thank you!
-
I agree with Oznappies' recommendation... tell them "this vehicle has been sold, but we have other similar models". Personally, I would offer them a link to similar models and a Back link, as some people will take exception to being led to a different car than the one they wanted to see. I would definitely not get rid of the old content, however. I would simply do a noindex follow.
-
If you only show the car image they were originally looking for and also the current ones available in 'mustang' then that would work for cross or upselling the customer. It could also give them the idea to get in quick if they like a particular vehicle, before it sells to. You could get fancy and track the click throughs on a give vehicle and show a heat map of level of interest, but that only works if you get reasonable interest on most vehicles.
-
Personally I'd keep all the old pages, and on them show a list of similar cars.. so if it was a Mustang, show other mustangs, etc.
-
Thank you, that's a good idea. So do you advise against keeping old vehicle pages available?
-
It does depend on if you have similar cars to sell. If so you could create a page with links to other vehicles that a buyer may be interested in and then add a 301 redirect to the new page. Depending on what your site developers are using, they could include an optional heading to specify that 'car xyz is no longer available, but we have many others' where xyz is determined from the refering page. This would give the new page where you have similar vehicle SEO juice and keep your customers infromed of what is in stock.
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
-
Strange: page no longer present in SERPS and I'm not sure why
I indexed a new page last week and it ranked 1st The page is still live, still registering sessions in analytics, registering activity in search console Why is it no longer present for the keyword in ranked first for on Friday?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing0 -
Faceted Navigation URLs Best Practices
Hi, We are developing new Products Pages with faceted filters. You can see it here: https://www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ We have a feature allowing to Order By and Group By, which alters the order of all products. There will also be the option to view Products as a table, which will contain same products but with different design and maybe slightly different content of each product. All this will happen without changing the URL, https://www.viatrading.com/all/ Is this the best practice? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
SEO implication of adding large number of new product pages
If I have an eCommerce website containing 10,000 product pages and then I add 10,000 new product pages using a bulk upload (with limited/basic but unique content), does this pose any SEO risk? I am obviously aware of the risks of adding a large number of low quality content to the website, which is not the case here, however what I am trying to ascertain is whether simply doubling the number of pages in itself causes any risk to our SEO efforts? Does it flag to the Search Engines that something "spammy" is happening (even if its not)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Best Practices for Moving a Sub-Domain to a Sub-Folder
One of my clients is moving their subdomain to a subfolder on their main domain. (ie. blog.example.com to example.com/blog) I just wanted to get everyone's thoughts on some best practices for things we should be doing/looking for when making this move.? ie WMT, .htaccess, 301s etc? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarinPirkey0 -
Best way to set up anchor text on parked pages?
Our company is no longer offering a series of products, much to the disappointment of our SEO team since we've spent a long time building up the pages and getting them ranked organically. The pages all have decent page rank and in some cases rank #1 for the primary keyword. We have a sister company that we acquired a year ago and they still offer these products on their website. They are a completely separate company with their own website which existed long before we acquired them and we have nothing to do with their website. Our team has proposed that rather than take down the URLs on our site for the products we no longer offer, to put a message saying something like "sorry we don't offer this anymore but you may be interested in this.." and then link to our sister company with anchor text so that they can get some benefit from our SEO efforts if we can't. The question/issue is how should we do that since there will be a lot of pages from the same domain, about 20 pages, all linking to a few pages on a different domain. Should the anchor text be varied unbranded or branded? On the one hand I think if we change up the anchor text used to link to another page many times from a single domain that looks strange and transparent to google. On the other hand unbranded text would be the better descriptor for users since we are deep linking to the product not the homepage of the other site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edu-SEO0 -
Best linking practice for international domains
SEOMoz team, I am wondering that in the days of Panda and Penguin SEOs have an opinion on how to best link between international domains for a web page property. Let's say you have brandname.DE (German site) brandname.FR (French site) brandname.CO.UK (British site) Right now we are linking form each site on the page to the other two language sites to make users aware of the translated version of the site which obviously make it a site wide link which seems to be lately disencouraged by Google. Did anyone out there have any ideas how to strategically interlink between international domains that represent language versions of a web site? /PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro0 -
Max # of Products / Links per Page on E-Commerce Site
We are getting ready to re-launch our e-commerce site and are trying to decide how many products to list per category page. Some of of our category pages have upwards of 100 products. While I'd love to list ALL the products on the root category page (to reduce hassle for customer, to index more products on a higher PR page), I'm a little worried about having it be too long, and containing too many on-page links. Would love some guidance on: Maximum number of internal links on a page If Google frowns on really long category pages Anything else I should be considering when making this decision Thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY2 -
I am working SEO on a website that has 2 pages for different variations of a keyword.
I have run into a situation where a website has 2 pages for different variations of a keyword. I personally like to use 1 page and make it powerful for a variety of variations of that keyword. Unfortunately for the site I’m working on, using only one page is not an option. Here is an example: They have a page for “Alex Miley Cameras” and then they have a page for “Alex Miley Cell Phones”. On the first one they want to rank for Alex Miley & Alex Miley Cameras. For the 2<sup>nd</sup> they want to rank for “Alex Miley Cell Phones”. My concern is will Google be indecisive on which page to rank for the keyword “Alex Miley” since they both contain this word. Also, will it affect any of the other words and spread the juice making each page weaker. I would appreciate advice on how to rank these pages each separately for their keywords and not have to worry about any confusion from Google. I can’t change the structure of the site. I only have access to the Meta info and page content. Thank you for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOPresident0