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.
When removing a product page from an ecommerce site?
-
What is the best practice for removing a product page from an Ecommerce site?
If a 301 is not available and the page is already crawled by the search engine
A. block it out in the robot.txt
B. let it 404
-
Bryan,
If I were removing 100 product pages from an eCommerce site because they barely convert I would approach it this way:
#1. Run the URls through a tool to see which ones have external backlinks.
Often times none of the pages will have any external backlinks, and those that do are usually not very good. If this is the case - or if you "really" aren't able to do any 301 redirects (and if so that's something that needs to be fixed) - skip to step #3. Otherwise...#2. 301 redirect those with external backlinks to the most relevant page, be that a similar product or the category page directly above the product to be removed. Try to avoid redirecting them all to the homepage or some other "catch all" page, as these may be treated like a 404 by Google.
#3. Simply remove the pages and show the custom 404 page that suggests other products, or whatever messaging you want to show there (e.g. "This product has been removed from our catalog. Please see these other products...") and be sure to check the http header response code (lots of free tools for that) to ensure these URLs actually serve a 404 response (note: This should show up on the removed URL, as opposed to redirecting the visitor to another page like .../404.html).
#4. Since the now-removed URLs are not linked to from anywhere, either internally or externally, it could take awhile for Google to recrawl them and see the 404 error. If you need this to happen more quickly, such as when dealing with duplicate manufacturer descriptions and removal of page to recover from Panda, it may be wise to provide some type of html sitemap file listing out the URLs long enough for Google to recrawl them.
I would not block them in the robots.txt file, as that could result in Google not seeing the 404 and not removing it from the index (though they will cease to show the meta description).
- topic:timeago_earlier,about a month
-
Okay the question is regarding indexing, I should of been more specific.
If we are removing 100 product pages from an ecommerce site because they barely convert (regardless of a nice 404 page) and we cannot transfer the user to a relevant page. Is it a best to leave the pages live? or remove them (404) and block them in the robots.txt file?
-
Hi Bryan,
There are various reasons to remove a product page from an eCommerce store. Before deciding to remove a product page, you should consider if removing it will in fact help your SEO. If not, you need to look into alternatives such as 301 redirects or informing visitors in the old product pages that the product is no longer available. I'm not sure why performing 301 redirects is not an option for you - you may want to consider trying to get access to do this.
We have written an article some time ago about the different scenarios an eCommerce store will face when deciding to remove old product pages, and how to deal with each scenario: http://blog.referralcandy.com/2011/12/14/how-to-remove-old-products/
Hope that helps!
-
Right the questions is regarding crawlability, link juice etc..
-
I would create a custom 404 page that gives users options of similar products or product categories.
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
-
How many pages for a new site for Google to sink it's teeth into
Hello, I've got a high traffic site I'm building. Is 20 articles enough to start or should I start with 40 or 60 to not flop? I've got good internal linking. I've got: 3 10X articles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 3, 2024, 10:10 AM | BobGW
17 cornerstones so far. Worked hard so far. Do I launch? or wait for 40? 60? I know thousands is best. Competitors have much more. Thank you, Bob0 -
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 31, 2024, 4:19 PM | shabbirmoosa0 -
What to do with sold product pages when everything you sell are unique one off items
Hi there, This is something i have been unsure of for years. It's a little different to most ecom website situations. What would you do with product pages when every product is a "one off" unique product and once sold will never be for sale again? Should i redirect to a category page? 404? Leave it as is marked as sold or say it is sold and show links to similar items? At the moment we have 700 products for sale but over 5000 sold products that have their own product page and my concern is as this grows it could become a lot for a WordPress woocommerce site to handle? I don't want to do anything to slow my site down or unnecessarily bloat it but i want to do the right thing by the visitor and also not do anything to hurt my rankings. These pages often rank in google and may have been there for years before the item actually sells. To throw another curve ball, there may be multiple other products (for sale or already sold) with the exact same name but are unique and different from each other. These products pages will often be 98% the same content as each other too. To explain how this could be the case, we sell artworks from many different artists, Every artwork is an original and is unique. But many artists paint the same subject matter multiple times, albeit in a slightly different way from previous times. So you end up with a unique product that has everything the same as another (same artist, same name of artwork, same size, same description, different image, different sku) but is actually different and unique. This has left me somewhat uncertain of what is best to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 24, 2020, 6:30 PM | Scottlinklater0 -
When is Too Many Categories Too Many on a eCommerce site?
We all know that more and more people are increasing the amount of different categories that eCommerce sites have. Say for example, you have over 3,000 different products, all categories contain unique text at the top of each, all of the categories link to each other (so loads on internal linking) and no two categories contain the exact same products. My question is this, is there ever a stage that you could create too many categories? Alternatively, do you think you should just keep creating categories based on what our customers search for?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 11, 2016, 4:01 AM | the-gate-films1 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 7, 2016, 10:41 PM | jnew9290 -
Best practice for retiring old product pages
We’re a software company. Would someone be able to help me with a basic process for retiring old product pages and re-directing the SEO value to new pages. We are retiring some old products to focus on new products. The new software has much similar functionality to the old software, but has more features. How can we ensure that the new pages get the best start in life? Also, what is the best way of doing this for users? Our plan currently is to: Leave the old pages up initially with a message to the user that the old software has been retired. There will also be a message explaining that the user might be interested in one of our new products and a link to the new pages. When traffic to these pages reduces, then we will delete these pages and re-direct them to the homepage. Has anyone got any recommendations for how we could approach this differently? One idea that I’m considering is to immediately re-direct the old product pages to the new pages. I was wondering if we could then provide a message to the user explaining that the old product has been retired but that the new improved product is available. I’d also be interested in pointing the re-directs to the new product pages that are most relevant rather than the homepage, so that they get the value of the old links. I’ve found in the past that old retirement pages for products can outrank the new pages as until you 301 them then all the links and authority flow to these pages. Any help would be very much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 24, 2014, 4:25 PM | RG_SEO0 -
Best way to implement canonical tags on an ecommerce site with many filter options?
What would be the best way to add canonical tags to an ecommerce site with many filter options, for example, http://teacherexpress.scholastic.com? Should I include a canonical tag for all filter options under a category even though the pages don't have the same content? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 22, 2013, 9:51 PM | DA20130 -
ECommerce product listed in multiple places, best SEO practice?
We have an eCommerce site we have built for a customer and the products are allowed to appear in more than one product category within the web site. Now I know this is a bad idea from a duplicate content point of view, But we are going to allow the customer to select which out of the multiple categories the product appears in will be the default category. This will mean we will have a way of defining what the default url is for a product. So am I correct in thinking all the other urls where the product appears we should add a rel canonical to these pages pointing to the default url to stop duplicate content? Is this the best way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 11, 2013, 3:08 PM | spiralsites0