E-commerce categrory out of stock items
-
Hi All,
I would like to hide all the products that are out of stock on my category pages, for example with a display:none (maybe there are better options/techniques do this....tips are welcome). The visitor has the options to reveal the out of stock items by using one of the filters, or by using a check-box "Show out of stock items".
Would this still be in line with Google's guidelines? Am I taking a risk to get a penalty cause I'm hiding content?
In my opinion it would not, cause I'm doing this to achieve a better user experience. Items are most of the time out of stock for a week not any longer.
Hope to hear from you guys.
Thanks in advance
Richard
-
Hello Richard,
That is a great question and I'm impressed by your attention to detail with regard to page-rank distribution changing as things go in and out of stock.
To answer your question, I don't think you risk being penalized for displaying in this way any more than thousands of other sites, including huge brands, risk it by using drop-down divs (e.g. "read more" , "transcript") and tabbed product description areas (e.g. "sizes", "description", "technical details", "Shipping costs") to break up the pertinent information into bite-sized chunks for the user. I work on a site that has checkboxes the user can uncheck to hide certain items if they don't wish to see them. This all uses similar coding to what you have described.
As long as you never specifically target Google (as in say "If Googlebot, then show this content, else show this other content) I think you'll be fine.
With that said, you may want to look into using a View-All rel canonical page to take care of that page-rank distribution issue you mentioned, depending on how it impacts the load-time of the page and how many links you will be sending part of your page-rank to: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html . If it were me I'd just stick to the solution you first asked about, but there are plenty of options.
Also think about the UX when a visitor lands on the out-of-stock product page. All it takes is a few quality raters or a few hundred organic visitors who land on that page while it's out of stock to give it a bad rating or a fast back-click to the SERPs and you could find yourself battling the effects of Panda, at least as far as I understand the process. Some options to improve that user experience include: Estimated date that the product will come back; ability to backorder; ability to sign up for an email alert when it gets back in stock; related product links with images.
Good luck!
Everett
-
I've made this change in September, and from the users point of view the experience is much better, I read some time ago that Google takes into account different sorting of categories,
Even when you add new products to a category, some of the others get pushed back, So I hope Google does know how to handle it.
I haven't tried to hide 'out of stock' products but I'm always careful with hiding stuff on the client side since this can be interpreted the wrong way by Google.
I think that doing it server side is better but It's the same like sorting.
The only reason to show an 'out of stock' product on top is if It's really popular and if you either know when It's coming back to stock or let the user subscribe to a 'back in stock' email.
Hops this helps
-
Thanks for your reply Asaf,
What I don't like about your solution is the fact that products keep moving between different pagination pages. This means Google will find the pages deeper in the hierarchical structure every now and then. It's hard to build a history on a specific ranking cause incoming link juice keeps changing.
Did you find out if hiding 'out of stock' items can cause a penalty?
Thanks again Asaf
-
I had the same problem,
What I finally did is to sort the products and always placing the temp out of stock products at the end of the list / or on the last page.
When a product is discontinued I remove it and 301 redirect to a similar product.
Asaf
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
-
Links On Out Of Stock Product Pages Causing 404
Hi Moz Community! We're doing an audit of our e-commerce site at the moment and have noticed a lot of 404 errors coming from out of stock/discontinued product pages that we've kept 200 in the past. We kept these and added links on them for categories or products that are similar to the discontinued items but many other links of the page like images, blog posts, and even breadcrumbs have broken or are no longer valid causing lots of additional 404s. If the product has been discontinued for a long time and gets no traffic and has no link equity would you recommend adding a noindex robots tag on these pages so we're not wasting time fixing all the broken links on these? Any thoughts?Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
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-DMG0 -
Sitemap Question - E-commerce - Magento
Good Morning... I have an ecommerce site running on Magento and the sitemap is automatically generated by Magento based on the categories and sub categories and products. I have recently created new categories that i want to replace the old categories, but they are both in the auto-generated sitemap. The old categories are "active" (as in still exist if you know the URL to type) but not visible (you can't find it just by navigating through the site). The new category pages are active and visible... If i want Google to rank one page (the new category page) and not the old page (old category page) should i remove the old page from the sitemap? Would removing the old page that used to target the same keywords improve my rankings on the newer category page? Sitemap currently contains: www.example.com/oldcategorypage www.example.com/newcategorypage Did I confuse you yet? Any help or guidance is appreciated. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Content Organization Advice with Big Commerce
Hi folks, We have three places with unique content for our company. Our ecommerce site (hosted on big commerce), our help desk knowledge base (subdomain, hosted on zendesk), and our blog (separate domain, self hosted wordpress). We're about to refocus our efforts on generating high quality content, and I'm trying to figure out the best strategy to organize it. I think from an SEO perspective, if we had all of the content hosted directly on our ecommerce site, that would be best. Unfortunately Big Commerce doesn't have much by way of content management. We can't (yet) install a blogging platform or CMS onto our root domain. What's the next best option? Does it do any good to move our blog to a subdomain? Should I try to post all content on our root domain and just deal with the lack of content management (i.e. just make a new web page for each blog entry). Basically, what's the best strategy in this situation for SEO? Any advice appreciated. Thanks so much! Hal
Technical SEO | | AlabuSkinCare0 -
Filter Tag Duplicate Content E-Commerce Issue
Hello, I just launched a new site for a client but am seeing some duplicate content issues in the campaign crawl. It has to do with the drill-down, filter "tags" that helps users find the product they are looking for. You can see them in the sidebar here: http://www.ssmd.com/shop/ In my crawl report this is what is showing up as duplicate content (attached image). How do I keep these widgets from generating duplicate content on the site? Also, not sure if it's important or not, but I am using Wordpress, WooCommerce and Yoast's SEO Tool. Any suggestions are appreciated! Screen%20Shot%202012-10-23%20at%202.56.00%20PM.png
Technical SEO | | kylehungate0 -
E-commerce site multi language product urls
Hi, On my E-commerce site I use optimized Url's (product names) with my native language (Hebrew) I am going to translate some of the product pages to English with differnat descriptions, correct layout, etc... But I was wandering about the product Url's. Should I stay with the original product URL and add a language parameter to the url? Should I add a completely new URL using the English product name? Of course what I'm worrying the most of is duplicate content. Thanks, Asaf
Technical SEO | | AsafY0 -
What's the best format for a e-commerce URL product page
We have over 2000 non branded experiences and activities sold through our website. The website is having a face lift with the a new look and a stronger focus on SEO. As part of this, I am keen to establish what the best practice is for product based URLs. I've researched the market and come up with a few alternatives that are used: domain/category/subcategory/activity_name domain/activity_name/category/subcategory/activity_reference domain/generic_term/activity_reference/activity_name domain/category/activity_location/activity_name Activities are location based but the location can change (say once every 2 years). Activity names, category, subcategory and activity_reference rarely change. Are there any thoughts/ research on the best method? (If there is one) Many thanks in advance for your insights.
Technical SEO | | philwill0 -
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like: staging.domain.com
Technical SEO | | fthead9
User-agent: *
Disallow: / in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.0