Best practice for a website where the publications (catalogues) expire frequently
-
Hi guys,
Hope to find some smart SEOs around here and where I can to contribute to the community!
I wanted to share an issue we are having with our website, which is focused on the promotional flyers of the supermarket chains. These are often valid for a short period of time and then expire. So it makes no sense to keep them but also, if we delete them, that would create a lot of 404s or something.
So how do you think it is the best way to go around this problem? should we delete them? or when deleted to redirect the dead pages to the homepage? or keep them in an archive live site.com/brand/archive/ ?
Thank you so much for any opinions, much appreciated!
Best
-
I think Anthony's idea on this is a good one and would be worth considering. I guess it depends on how many of these you have rotating at any one time and how many URLs you therefore have to maintain.
My thought on it would be to create a custom 404 page for your site that is a more pleasant landing page than regular 404 pages are. It could provide a nice apology that the content the link took them the person to is no longer available and show a number of anchored links for where the visitor may like to go to next, e.g. where to view other promotional flyers or other pages on the site which may be important to the visitor.
By doing that you provide a better visitor experience. Here are the recommendations from Moz's page on HTTP status codes. I think these make a lot of sense:
----------------------------- When visitors reach 404 pages, they should be given navigational options so they do not leave the given site. Web optimized 404 errors pages should contain:
- notification that the user has reached a page that does not exist
- a search box
- a easy to understand navigation system so the user can potentially find what they were orginally looking to access
- a link to the home page
-----------------------------
I hope that helps,
Peter -
I think this assessment is spot on. I think the superior strategy would what you mentioned at the end. If you updated the content continuously I believe you would create the most value for the user.
-
Hi-
This is a common problem for many websites, think Job Postings or Real Estate.
There are a few ways to handle it, and you have to decide what is best for your business. As of now, it sounds as if each flier is living on it's own unique URL on your site. Here are the scenarios for that set-up.
- Create a unique page for each weeks flyer, let them 404 when removed
- Create a unique page for each weeks flyer, archive them
- Create a unique page for each weeks flyer, redirect all back to parent subcategory/store page
- Create a unique page for each weeks flyer, selectively redirect pages to subcategory/store page if you know there are external links pointing at it
What I wonder is if you could just update the content and keep the URL the same.
website.com/store-name/weekly-flier
This would allow you to continuously build links to the same page and build it's authority and ranking ability over time. You could still choose to archive it if you wanted, but I wonder if that would have value for any of your users.
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
-
ECommerce Website Internal Links
We run an ecommerce website... approx 8K products. When using the page grader, MOZ tools consistently tell me that I have too many Internal Links on the page.
On-Page Optimization | | Ampweb
These are caused from our fairly large menu system, and probably from the sub-category links on the category landing pages as well. I was reading an article that mentioned a no-follow on these Internal links would not really solve the "Too many internal links issue", so wanted to check if anyone has ideas or should I just dis-regard this MOZ suggestion that there are too many in this type of environment?0 -
H1 tags are ok for my website?
Please review the H1 tags for my website and let me know if they are ok or I need to change them? Website - brandstenmedia.com.au
On-Page Optimization | | Green.landon0 -
How to reduced dns requests on magneto website
How to reduced dns requests on magneto website, really stuck, read many documents but no where near resolving the issues.
On-Page Optimization | | Mikaai0 -
Website Updates
What's considered a safe number when it comes to making on-site seo changes/updates for pages of a website (refreshing copy, changing title tags, optimizing images, etc)? 1 a day? 5 a day? We need to make these changes but we don't want Google to freak out and have it have the opposite effect on our ranking.
On-Page Optimization | | SEOhughesm0 -
Do i optimise only the page that i want to rank or do i have to optimise my entire website.
I'm looking at 2 keywords and i have optimized my main page towards it. My website consist of other pages like, "About Us, Contact Us, Testimonials". My SEO title and Meta Description for these pages are just the basic. Q: My question is, do i have to optimize the pages that i do not want to rank? Is there any way to utilise these pages to help my main page to rank?(besides using them for internal links)
On-Page Optimization | | kevinbp0 -
Language for URLs on new international websites
We are due to launch our new site and it will be targeting an international market. We have setup these new sites in the following way www.website.com/fr/content-goes-here www.website.com/es/content-goes-here This has been done in conjunction with setting up the parameters in GWT and making sure it is optimised for the language itself, and that countries search engine. But our web dev team have said that the URLs at the moment will be in english and not the native language, so if you were on the french version of our site you would see the url in english and not french. Will this negatively affect the site for SEO, and who else would think it would be negative from a usability perspective? Any help is appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | RyanCrawf19840 -
Question about url structure for large real estate website
I've been running a large real estate rental website for the past few years and on May 8, 2013 my Google traffic dropped by about 50%. I'm concerned that my current url structure might be causing thin content pages for certain rental type + location searches. My current directory structure is:
On-Page Optimization | | Amped
domain.com/home-rentals/california/
domain.com/home-rentals/california/beverly-hills/
domain.com/home-rentals/california/beverly-hills/90210/
domain.com/apartment-rentals/california/
domain.com/apartment-rentals/california/beverly-hills/
domain.com/apartment-rentals/california/beverly-hills/90210/
etc.. I was thinking of changing it to the following:
domain.com/rentals/california/
domain.com/rentals/california/beverly-hills/
domain.com/rentals/california/beverly-hills/90210/ ** Note: I'd provide users the ability to filter their results by rental type - by default all types would be displayed. Another question - my listing pages are currently displayed as:
domain.com/123456 And I've been thinking of changing it to:
domain.com/123456-123-Street-City-State-Zip Should I proceed with both changes - one or the one - neither - or something else I'm not thinking of? Thank you in advance!!0 -
E commerce Website canonical and duplicate content isssue
i have a ecomerce site , i am just wondering if any one could help me answer this the more info page can be access will google consider it as duplicate and if it does then how to best use the canonical tag http://domain.com/product-page http://domain.com/product-page/ http://domain.com/product-Page http://domain.com/product-Page/ also in zencart when link product it create duplicate page content how to tackle it? many thanks
On-Page Optimization | | conversiontactics0