E Commerce site - removing discontinued items
-
We have been hit with a Panda penalty and the site has slowly been losing rankings since January, I've now realised that we have 4000+ page indexed in Google, but only 2000 live products.
We have never deleted any of the pages with discontinued items, most of which were created when keyword stuffing and thin content reigned supreme - which explains the Panda penalty.
But which is the best and quickest way to delete them from Google?
We have already implemented a 'noindex' across all these pages, but as they are no longer in the 'crawlable' site, how will Google find them to know this?
Would a 404 work any better - I'm not concerned about any link juice etc to/from these pages, I just want rid.
I'm not sure if we can move all these pages into a dedicated directory which would allow us to use Google's Removal Tool - using it with the individual urls would be a mammoth task.
Any advice would be most greatly appreciated.
-
Sounds good. Thanks for following up and letting us know.
-
We decided to go with a 410 for those deleted items, some of which were up to 5 years old!. They had all gone within a couple of days. The more recent out of stock or deleted products we're 301ing back to the main category page.
Thanks to all for their responses.
-
If you just want to get rid of the pages, I'd 301 redirect them all to their corresponding category page or just all to the homepage. That way the search engines can find the redirects and make the adjustments and anyone who goes to the page (either from your site, a bookmark, or an external link) will not get an error.
If you have bad links to the pages, then just delete them, but note that you may end up with a bunch of errors and broken links on your site.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
First be sure that you do not have an unnatural links penalty or a penguin problem. If you have problems there fix them first.
Then get into webmaster tools. Determine which of these discontinued items pages have valuable links.
Then get into your analytics. Determine which of these discontinued items pages are still pulling traffic.
Any pages that has valuable links or is still pulling traffic could be valuable. Decide if you sell an updated product or can sell a similar product. If you can then use those pages for that new product. If you don't have a replacement product then decide if there is another way to monetize those pages. If yes, then do it. If no, then, 301 redirect those pages to an appropriate destination.
Any page that is not pulling traffic and has no valuable links can be deleted and the URL redirected to a category page or your homepage.
-
I would delete those pages. Please check this post http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2296653/Removing-Unnatural-Links-by-Removing-Pages-on-Your-Website
If you have bad content or bad links pointing to those pages you can delete those pages. Many ecommerce CMS systems have an option to only publish live / in stock articles. So you should be able to get rid of those pages easily!
I hope this helps
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
-
Remove unwanted web pages
Hi All, I have a number of web pages that yield little or no traffic. I have analysed the traffic data in both normal SERPs and Google Adwords over a year. All low traffic pages rank on the first page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
Redirecting these poor performing pages to the main content page would provide the user with a richer experience. Why do I need to remove these pages?
Cost, time and duplicate content issues is causing untold problems.
Removing the existance of the low/no traffic pages will allow me to provide fresh content on the main content pages. Question
Each main content page has about 20 low/no traffic pages associated with it.
I have about 30 instances of the main page scenario. Would carrying htacces page redirects hurt my ranking or worse? Regards Mark0 -
How are you taking you e-commerce site forward in 2014
Hi MOZland, With a new (our first e-commerce) client, we're going through a massive learning curve in handling a site of substantial size and complexity for the first time. While we've weeded out most of the on-page stuff that needed sorting, and we're in the process of dumping poor links implemented by previous SEO/online marketing efforts, do you have any suggestions about how to take a big e-commerce site forward in 2014, especially concerning technical pitfalls and link building efforts (and given that guest blogging has become something of a faux pas). Cheers, M
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Impact of simplifying website and removing 80% of site's content
We're thinking of simplifying our website which has grown to a very large size by removing all the content which hardly ever gets visited. The plan is to remove this content / make changes over time in small chunks so that we can monitor the impact on SEO. My gut feeling is that this is okay if we make sure to redirect old pages and make sure that the pages we remove aren't getting any traffic. From my research online it seems that more content is not necessarily a good thing if that content is ineffective and that simplifying a site can improve conversions and usability. Could I get people's thoughts on this please? Are there are risks that we should look out for or any alternatives to this approach? At the moment I'm struggling to combine the needs of SEO with making the website more effective.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Does anyone have any experience using GoodRelations Snippet Generator for E-Commerce versus markup from Schema.org?
I am trying to implement Structured Data markup on a large e-commerce site that has ancient code and is not on any standard e-commerce platform. It is a Webstore we self-host that was developed for us and heavily customized. What's worse is that I don't have access to the source code. I have to somehow instruct our IT Director how and where to place everything. So I'm going to need to be meticulously specific. As I began wading through our code and determining where to insert code as instructed by Schema.org I ran across this on one of their pages: "This class contains derivatives of properties from the GoodRelations Vocabulary for E-Commerce, created by Martin Hepp. GoodRelations is a data model for sharing e-commerce data on the Web that can be expressed in a variety of syntaxes, including RDFa and HTML5 Microdata. More information about GoodRelations can be found at http://purl.org/goodrelations/." I went to check it out and it appears that this could be a great resource as it has a snippet generator and several "cookbooks" for adding micro data to our site. Here's a link to their snippet generator: http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/grsnippetgen/ However, with a catalog of 5,000 SKUs, needless to say we aren't going to plug in our products into this generator one-by one. Has anyone here successfully used GoodRelations to help them implement micro data into a large E-commerce site that isn't a standard platform (not Magento, WP, Joomla or Volusion) ?? I would be very greatful to anyone who can share their experiences and or make suggestions on how we might best proceed. Thanks! Dana
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Asking Sites to Remove Links.. What should I say?
After getting some guidance from you guys here on this forum i have decided to go through my WMT backlinks and contact all the sites that I think are spammy and are linking back to me....and I will ask them to remove my links from their sites... Can you guys please provide some guidance as to what I should say in the letter (also, anything i should definitely not say).... Thanks for the help...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
Load balanced Site
Our client ecommerce site load from 3 different servers using load balancing. abc.com : IP: 222.222.222 Abc.com: IP: 111.111.111 For testing purpose 111.111.111 also point to beta.abc.com Now google crawling site beta.abc.com If we block beta.abc.com using robots.txt it will block google bot also , since beta.abc.com is really abc.com I know its confusing but I been trying to figure out. Ofcourse I can ask my dev to remove beta.abc.com make a seperate code and block it using .htaccess
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tpt.com0 -
ReLaunching a very old site
Hi, I am in the process of re-vamping a website that hasn't been touched for years and whose rankings slowly dropped. Any best practice in how to do it making sure that there's not any more loss and - hopefully - it could go back to the old glory? The website is http://www.nlp-world.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdmonline0 -
Key page of site not ranking at all
Our site has the largest selection of dog clothes on the Internet. We're been (every so slowly) creeping up in the rankings for the "dog clothes" term, but for some reason only rank for our home page. Even though the home page (and every page on the domain) has links pointing to our specific Dog Clothes page, that page doesn't even rank anywhere when searching Google with "dog clothes site:baxterboo.com". http://www.google.com/webhp?source=hp&q=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=webhp&source=hp&q=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=f4efcaa1b8c328f Pages 2+ of product results from that page rank, but not the base page. It's not excluded in robots.txt, All on site links to that page use the same URL. That page is loaded with more text that includes the keywords. I don't believe there's duplicated content. What am I missing? Has the page somehow been penalized?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBPets0