Ecommerce SEO - Indexed product pages are returning 404's due to product database removal. HELP!
-
Hi all,
I recently took over an e-commerce start-up project from one of my co-workers (who left the job last week). This previous project manager had uploaded ~2000 products without setting up a robot.txt file, and as a result, all of the product pages were indexed by Google (verified via Google Webmaster Tool).
The problem came about when he deleted the entire product database from our hosting service, godaddy and performed a fresh install of Prestashop on our hosting plan. All of the created product pages are now gone, and I'm left with ~2000 broken URL's returning 404's. Currently, the site does not have any products uploaded. From my knowledge, I have to either:
- canonicalize the broken URL's to the new corresponding product pages,
or
- request Google to remove the broken URL's (I believe this is only a temporary solution, for Google honors URL removal request for 90 days)
What is the best way to approach this situation? If I setup a canonicalization, would I have to recreate the deleted pages (to match the URL address) and have those pages redirect to the new product pages (canonicalization)?
Alex
-
Everett,
You're right on the money. I don't think you could have summarized my problem any better. I will take Dana's and your advice and let them sit "indexed" for a while and serve a 404. According to GWT's Index Status, the product pages were indexed about a month ago, so I guess it won't hurt to wait a few more weeks until those pages dropped out of Google's index naturally, especially since the site development won't be done for another 6~7 weeks.
Thanks a bunch for all of your insights
-
Right on Everett. I agree 100%
-
I want to make sure everyone, including myself, understands you Alex. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying that the website is totally new (a start-up) and nothing (at least nothing owned by the company you're with) has ever been on that domain name. While building the site the previous guy accidentally allowed the development version of the site to be indexed, and/or allowed product pages that you don't want on the site at all to be indexed. Since it is a brand new site those "old" pages that were deleted didn't have any external links, and didn't have any traffic from Google or elsewhere outside of the company.
IF that is the case, then you can probably just let those pages stay as 404s. Eventually, since nobody is linking to them, they will drop out of the index on their own.
I wouldn't use the URL removal tool in this case. For one thing, it is a dangerous tool and if you don't have experience with this sort of thing it could do more harm than good. It should only take a few weeks for those URLs that were briefly live and indexed to go away if you are serving a 404 or 410 http header response code on those URLs.
I hope this helps. Please let us know if we have misinterpreted your problem.
-
Understood Alex. Yes, of course you would have to rebuild the pages first before you can 301, but it sounds like you are planning on rebuilding them (otherwise you wouldn't be able to use canonical tags either, because there wouldn't be a page to put them on).
I wouldn't just give up and ask Google to remove all of the old URLs. I agree with what Mike has to say about that below. A 302 is a good option if you are worried about the 404s sitting in the index while you are rebuilding your product pages. If you are still on the same platform (it sounds like that didn't change), I would suggest rebuilding as many of the old URLs as you can (if they were good SEO-friendly URLs). That way you could bypass the 301 redirect. If you want to create your pages so that product options are rolled in and separate colors of things no longer need separate pages, you can then choose whether to 301 redirect those old URLs or simply let them 404.
404s aren't necessarily always a bad thing. Regarding the 2,000 of them you have now, if some of those pages just need to go away, you can let them 404 and they will eventually drop out of Google's index. You aren't required to manually submit them via GWT in order for them to be removed.
-
Hi Mike,
Thanks for weighing in. Recreating all of the old pages seems like a pain in the butt... Besides, the site never launched, so I had no traffic at all. Considering there was no traffic at all to these pages, do you think it's a good idea to go through the URL removal from GWT and purge the broken links completely from Google's index?
- Alex
-
Hi Dana,
Thank you for your advice. I'm new at SEO, so I may be wrong but...
Mapping out the old/new URLs on a spreadsheet and setting up a 301 redirect to the new URLs is not a plausible option in my opinion, mainly because the new URLs literally do not exist (I have not created ANY product pages). According to your suggestion, I would have to create new product pages and do a 301 redirect from the broekn URLs to the newly created pages? Not quite sure if I'm understanding you correctly...
In addition, the previous project manager wasn't SEO-savvy (l'm not either... sigh..), so he didn't know that creating separate pages for a product with multiple attributes (such as flavor and size) would result in major duplicate content issues.
The site is going through some major design/layout overhaul, and I intend to come up with a SEO strategy before creating any categories or products.
Thus...
Do you think it's better to submit a URL removal request on GWT and get rid of the indexed URL's completely? I just re-read Google's policy on URL removal, and it states that as long as I have a 4xx (404 or 410, I'm assuming..) returned for the URLs, Google will honor the removal request.
- Alex
-
Rel Canonical is not quite the right thing for this sort of issue.
If you're worried about the 404s sitting around too long and losing traffic for the moment, you can 302 everything to a landing page, category page, or homepage while you work on setting everything else up. You have two choices at this point.... 1) recreate all of the old pages and old URLs then remove the 302s, or 2) Add new products and new URLs, then as Dana said you'll need to map out all your new product URLs and old URLs to determine what old URL should be 301 redirected where. Then set up your necessary 301s and test that they all work.
-
Hi Alex, I am sorry to hear about this. What a mess, no? If it were me, I wouldn't rely solely on the canonical tag. I would also create a spreadsheet and map all the old URLs to the new URLs and set up 301 redirects from the old to the new. 2,000 isn't too bad. You can probably knock them out in 2-3 days...but be sure to test all of the 301s and make sure they are performing the way you expect them to. Hope that helps a little!
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
-
Crawl and Indexation Error - Googlebot can't/doesn't access specific folders on microsites
Hi, My first time posting here, I am just looking for some feedback on a indexation issue we have with a client and any feedback on possible next steps or items I may have overlooked. To give some background, our client operates a website for the core band and a also a number of microsites based on specific business units, so you have corewebsite.com along with bu1.corewebsite.com, bu2.corewebsite.com. The content structure isn't ideal, as each microsite follows a structure of bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx, bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx and so on. In addition to this each microsite has duplicate folders from the other microsites so bu1.corewebsite.com has indexable folders bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx but also bu1.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx the same with bu2.corewebsite.com has bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx but also bu2.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx. Therre are 5 different business units so you have this duplicate content scenario for all microsites. This situation is being addressed in the medium term development roadmap and will be rectified in the next iteration of the site but that is still a ways out. The issue
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ImpericMedia
About 6 weeks ago we noticed a drop off in search rankings for two of our microsites (bu1.corewebsite.com and bu2.corewebsite.com) over a period of 2-3 weeks pretty much all our terms dropped out of the rankings and search visibility dropped to essentially 0. I can see that pages from the websites are still indexed but oddly it is the duplicate content pages so (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx or (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4/home.aspx is still indexed, similiarly on the bu2.corewebsite microsite bu2.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx and bu4.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx are indexed but no pages from the BU1 or BU2 content directories seem to be indexed under their own microsites. Logging into webmaster tools I can see there is a "Google couldn't crawl your site because we were unable to access your site's robots.txt file." This was a bit odd as there was no robots.txt in the root directory but I got some weird results when I checked the BU1/BU2 microsites in technicalseo.com robots text tool. Also due to the fact that there is a redirect from bu1.corewebsite.com/ to bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4.aspx I thought maybe there could be something there so consequently we removed the redirect and added a basic robots to the root directory for both microsites. After this we saw a small pickup in site visibility, a few terms pop into our Moz campaign rankings but drop out again pretty quickly. Also the error message in GSC persisted. Steps taken so far after that In Google Search Console, I confirmed there are no manual actions against the microsites. Confirmed there is no instances of noindex on any of the pages for BU1/BU2 A number of the main links from the root domain to microsite BU1/BU2 have a rel="noopener noreferrer" attribute but we looked into this and found it has no impact on indexation Looking into this issue we saw some people had similar issues when using Cloudflare but our client doesn't use this service Using a response redirect header tool checker, we noticed a timeout when trying to mimic googlebot accessing the site Following on from point 5 we got a hold of a week of server logs from the client and I can see Googlebot successfully pinging the site and not getting 500 response codes from the server...but couldn't see any instance of it trying to index microsite BU1/BU2 content So it seems to me that the issue could be something server side but I'm at a bit of a loss of next steps to take. Any advice at all is much appreciated!0 -
SEO Strategy help
Hi, I run a B2B 3rd party retail ecommerce site and I am kind of stuck on how to implement my SEO strategy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steve45058
So I learned from AdWords data that the best converting words to my site is the (Brand name, Model Number). Many of my B2B customers already know what they want/are looking for. Now this is all fine and dandy for adwords, but I don't really know how to implement this strategy on the SEO side. I do rank decent for some of these product keywords, but 99% of them I do not (which confuses me because some of the brands I rank high for are the more popular brands eg. more competition.) When I do keyword research on SEMRush or another site, it tells me that the competition for this type of keyword strategy is extremely high. Any Help, Advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!1 -
Complicated Duplicate Content Question...but it's fun, so please help.
Quick background: I have a page that is absolutely terrible, but it has links and it's a category page so it ranks. I have a landing page which is significantly - a bizillion times - better, but it is omitted in the search results for the most important query we need. I'm considering switching the content of the two pages, but I have no idea what they will do. I'm not sure if it will cause duplicate content issues or what will happen. Here are the two urls: Terrible page that ranks (not well but it's what comes up eventually) https://kemprugegreen.com/personal-injury/ Far better page that keeps getting omitted: https://kemprugegreen.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-attorney/ Any suggestions (other than just wait on google to stop omitting the page, because that's just not going to happen) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Pagination on a product page with reviews spread out on multiple pages
Our current product pages markup only have the canonical URL on the first page (each page loads more user reviews). Since we don't want to increase load times, we don't currently have a canonical view all product page. Do we need to mark up each subsequent page with its own canonical URL? My understanding was that canonical and rel next prev tags are independent of each other. So that if we mark up the middle pages with a paginated URL, e.g: Product page #1http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2" />**Product page #2 **http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692" />http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=3" />Would mean that each canonical page would suggest to google another piece of unique content, which this obviously isn't. Is the PREV NEXT able to "override" the canonical and explain to Googlebot that its part of a series? Wouldn't the canonical then be redundant?Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Don340 -
Product with two common names: A separate page for each name, or both on one page?
This is a real-life problem on my ecommerce store for the drying rack we manufacture: Some people call it a Clothes Drying Rack, while others call it a Laundry Drying Rack, but it's really the same thing. Search volume is higher for the clothes version, so give it the most attention. I currently have 2 separate pages with the On-Page optimization focused on each name (URL, Title, h1, img alts, etc) Here the two drying rack pages: clothes focused page and laundry focused page But the ranking of both pages is terrible. The fairly generic homepage shows up instead of the individual pages in Google searches for the clothes drying rack and for laundry drying rack. But I can get the individual page to appear in a long-tail search like this: round wooden clothes drying rack So my thought is maybe I should just combine both of these pages into one page that will hopefully be more powerful. We would have to set up the On-Page optimization to cover both "clothes & laundry drying rack" but that seems possible. Please share your thoughts. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Is there another solution? Thanks for your help! Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
1 Ecommerce site for several product segments or 1 Ecommerce site for each product segment ?
I am currently struggling with the decision whether to create individual ecommerce sites for each of 3 consumer product segments or rather to integrate them all under one umbrella domain. Obviously integration under 1 domain makes link building easier, but I am not sure how far google will favor in rankings websites focussed on one topic=product segment. Product segments are medium competitive.Product segments are not directly related but there may be some overlap in customer demographics- Any thoughts ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse1 -
Need help on SEO for my site. Can't figure out what is wrong.
My site, findyogi.com, isn't ranking well in google SERPs. For some good content and matching keyword, my pages are ranking 200+ whereas other sites that have similar or lower authority are ranking in top 10. I must be doing something fundamentally wrong but can't seem to figure out what. I am not looking at ranking 1 on google right now but my pages don't appear even on page 2-4. Sample Keyword- "Samsung galaxy s4 price in india" . Matching page - www.findyogi.com/mobiles/samsung/samsung-galaxy-s4-b94a37/price Please help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | namansr0 -
Page Titles SEO Title
Hi, I run an e-commerce store and within the CMS I define the SEO title, SEO description and SEO keywords for each item. I spoke to a SEO firm who advised me to start every product title with the colour, as this will reduce the duplicate page titles and serve me well in the future. Whats everyones view on this? Does naming something Grey Armani Jeans | Armani Jeans from Designer Boutique stand up better against Armani Jeans Grey | Armani Jeans from Designer Boutique? Any help or tips on how to format the page titles and descriptions would be great. Thanks Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WillBlackburn0