Ecommerce catalog update: 301 redirects?
-
Hello mozers,
We run an ecommerce store and are planning a massive catalog update this month. Essentially, 100% of our product listings will be deleted, and an all new catalog will be uploaded. The new catalog contains mostly new products, however there are some products that already existing in the old catalog as well.
The new catalog has a bunch of improvements to the product pages, included optimized meta titles and descriptions, multiple language, optimized URLs and more.
My question is the following:
When we delete the existing catalog, all indexed URLs will return 404 errors. Setting up 301 redirects from old to new products (for products which existing previously) is not feasible given the number of products. Also, many products are simply being remove entirely.
So should we go ahead and delete all products, upload the new catalog, update the sitemap, resubmit it for crawling, and live with a bunch of 404 errors until these URLs get dropped from Google?
The alternative I see is setting 301 redirects to the home page, but I am not sure this would be correct use of 301 redirects.
Thanks for your input.
-
Thanks for the info.
In my books a 301 redirect is for a direct replacement of an old webpage for a new one. I knew a bunch of 404 errors would be problematic, but I was also worried setting up 301 redirects to the home page (which is not a replacement for the product page being removed) would not agree with best practices.
Also good point regarding existing incoming links pointing to the pages being removed.
I think what we'll do is export URLs from the Google index, and either set a 301 redirect to the new product page (if it exists) or if not we'll 301 redirect to that product's category page.
-
I don't fully agree with the answer above - having 404's is not a direct cause for demoting. Check https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html . Another interesting video on expired e-commerce products is here: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882. Redirecting to the homepage (or any other non related page) is certainly not a good thing - this would be considered a soft 404.
It is however best practice to redirect products that remain in the catalog to the newer versions of the page. Even for those that don't remain in catalog you might consider to redirect them to a closely related new product. You indicate that given the number of products this would be not feasible. Are there no common patterns in the url to redirect these pages in bulk? Is it possible to put the redirect in the page header?
Redirects (properly implemented = going to the corresponding content) are both good for users & Google. If you don't redirect it will take some time before the new products are indexed and replacing the old ones in the ranking - which will almost certainly lead to rank loss: the 404 results will quickly disappear from the results and it will take a lot longer for the new ones to take their positions, it they manage to get back to these positions at all.
If you happen to have links point to these old product pages - you will loose these as well if they go to a 404.
In case that redirects is indeed not a valid option - make sure that you have a custom 404 pages so that user can easily find what their looking for. It might reduce the damage a bit.
If it was my site - I would try to find a solution to implement 301's.
Dirk
-
You should definitely not let those URLs die. Having a ton of 404 errors is a sure fire way to have Google demote your site for poor quality. I recommend selecting your top 100 or so products, based on Google Analytics traffic numbers and importance to your business, and apply one-to-one 301 redirects for those. The rest of the old products can be redirected to the homepage, or maybe the main store page.
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
-
301 Redirect in breadcrumb. How bad is it?
Hi all, How bad is it to have a link in the breadcrumb that 301 redirects? We had to create some hidden category pages in our ecommerce platform bigcommerce to create a display on our category pages in a certain format. Though whilst the category page was set to not visable in bigcommerce admin the URL still showed in the live site bread crumb. SO, we set a 301 redirect on it so it didnt produce a 404. However we have lost a lot of SEO ground the past few months. could this be why? is it bad to have a 301 redirect in the breadrcrumb.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
Should I redirect my HTTP to my HTTPS ?
I am about to make a domain name change for my online shop. I have heard that redirecting my HTTP to my https is a good SEO Practice. I have www, non-www, as well as https-www and https-non-www declared in Search console. Both have non-www set as preferred domain. Is the redirect rule from HTTP to https really usefull ? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kepass0 -
Keyword rank and redirecting
I'm creating a new amazon affiliate site. I've researched other successful sites. I've noticed that they are ranking for 1000s of keywords, but many of these long tail keywords are redirected back to a main page. I can see how this can reduce the overall total amount of content pages on the site. How are you able to rank for the keyword in the first place if the the page is redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lkomontt760 -
Multilingual Site and 301 redirection
Hey there awesome people of Moz I have this site that has many languages in it. The main language is English and my developer did the following www.example.com ( is the main site ) which redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en if your geo location is supported by our languages then you will automatically be redirected to whatever language you have in your country but does the first language with is english have to 301 redirect to www.example.com/en ? I thought that the right way is to just leave /en at the root file. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
301 Redirect from now defunct website?
Hi guys Quick question about 301 redirection between domains. I currently manage a website, lets call it website A. Website A sells a particular product range, however the decision has been made by the powers that be to pull the plug on the business and sell the products previously sold via Website A via another website within the parent companies control.....lets call it Website B. I need to make it clear to customers of Website A that the company no longer operates but want to pass the SEO equity that has been built up over time to the relevant pages on Website B. My plan was to 1. 301 Redirect all key landing pages on Website A to the most relevant pages on Website B 2. Initially keep the website A homepage live but change the message to say "Website A no longer operates, but Website B can help etc. etc." Remove all sub links from navigation. 3. Monitor referral and direct traffic levels and consider 301 redirecting website A homepage to Website B homepage in the long term. My questions: Does this sound like the best approach? If not, what alternatives are there? Will Website A look like a link farm for Website B? I dont want this obviously!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Is there anything wrong with this 301 redirect?
I'll keep this one short and sweet 🙂 Many moons ago we used to have several different methods of sorting our products and this change in sort order was achieved by having ?dispmode=list or ?dispmode=grid after the product URL. Best part of a year ago we decided to scrap this feature and 301'd all the ?dispmode URL's back to the base URL. The funny thing is that Google don't seem to have dropped a single one of the old URL's from their index and a search for site:www.refreshcartridges.co.uk dispmode returns almost 8,000 results. This isn't a massive problem but I'd have expected in the past year they'd have picked up on a couple of the 301's and would have started removing the old results. I'd hate to think we were getting any kind of penalisation for duplicate pages. I know the answer to this question is going to be 'just be patient, the old results will disappear' but just to ensure we're not missing anything stupid. I'd really appreciate it if someone could check out www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/brother-c-223.html?dispmode=list to confirm there's nothing more we could be doing to get these old results removed from the index. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Buying Domains from an auction and 301 redirecting to your new site.
Lets say I have a website in not to competitive niche. I was considering buying a few aged domains from godaddy auctions and 301 redirecting them to my new domain. Can this alone be enough to rank pretty high for a uncompetitive niche? Can this also be a link building technique in itself since the link juice from the domain purchased carries over? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | junkcars0 -
Why isnt my crawl results showing a 301 redirect even though I have a 301 rewrite in my .htaccess file?
Ive searched the previous Q&A's & cant find an answer so I;ll ask it here 🙂 crawling my site shows isnt the 301 redirect that i have from my non www to my www domainIts only showing all the results for my www subdomain.As i'm new to SEO & SeoMoz I dont fully understand. Any help would be greatly appreciated because my site is like 2 & a half years old & i'm trying to learn seo so I can rank higher in the serp's. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PCTechGuy20120