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.
Should I use the on classified listing pages that have expired?
-
We have went back and forth on this and wanted to get some outside input. I work for an online listing website that has classified ads on it. These ads are generated by companies on our site advertising weekend events around the country. We have about 10,000 companies that use our service to generate their online ads. This means that we have thousands of pages being created each week. The ads have lots of content: pictures, sale descriptions, and company information. After the ads have expired, and the sale is no longer happening, we are currently placing the in the heads of each page. The content is not relative anymore since the ad has ended. The only value the content offers a searcher is the images (there are millions on expired ads) and the descriptions of the items for sale. We currently are the leader in our industry and control most of the top spots on Google for our keywords. We have been worried about cluttering up the search results with pages of ads that are expired. In our Moz account right now we currently have over 28k crawler warnings alerting us to the being in the page heads of the expired ads. Seeing those warnings have made us nervous and second guessing what we are doing.
Does anybody have any thoughts on this? Should we continue with placing the in the heads of the expired ads, or should we be allowing search engines to index the old pages. I have seen websites with discontinued products keeping the products around so that individuals can look up past information. This is the closest thing have seen to our situation.
Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated!
-Matt
-
Hi,
I think it depends on the site, but my initial thoughts are that there probably isn't a lot of value to having those pages at all. Imagine the site grew to 50X the size it is now, would it make sense to have those pages? By that point, the site would have more thin/no indexed pages than new useful ones.
I think it's important to think from a user point of view. Just because you add noindex doesn't mean Google will take the page out of the index in a hurry. That means there is a lot of potential for people to still find you in Google, arrive on an expired ad, have a bad experience and leave. What about trying to do something a bit more useful like redirecting them to a closely matched product category above? Even doing that might be confusing to users unless you have an overlay explaining that the product is no longer available, so you are redirecting them to a different page.
Craig
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
-
Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?
Hi everyone! Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/ We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/). Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page? Thank you! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
What should happen to expired real estate listings?
For a real estate website, when a house is sold or taken off of the market. What should happen to the listing? 301 redirect it to the grouping (such as zip code or city) which that listing resides in? 404 it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wattssw0 -
How do I list the subdomains of a domain?
Hi Mozers, I am trying to find what subdomains are currently active on a particular domain. Is there a way to get a list of this information? The only way I could think of doing it is to run a google search on; site:example.com -site:www.example.com The only issues with this approach is that a majority of the indexed pages exist on the non-www domain and I still have thousands of pages in the results (mainly from the non-www). Is there another way to do it in Google? OR is there a server admin online tool that will tell me this information? Cheers, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlaidler0 -
Does an H1 have to be at the top of a page?
Because H1 "may" carry some weight with Google does it have to be placed at the top of the page? Can I place it towards the bottom of the page instead in normal body size? My goal is to keep the main keywords in the H1 but create a much friendlier title for the customer to read at the top of the page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty0 -
Why does my home page show up in search results instead of my target page for a specific keyword?
I am using Wordpress and am targeting a specific keyword..and am using Yoast SEO if that question comes up.. and I am at 100% as far as what they recommend for on page optimization. The target html page is a "POST" and not a "Page" using Wordpress definitions. Also, I am using this Pinterest style theme here http://pinclone.net/demo/ - which makes the post a sort of "pop-up" - but I started with a different theme and the results below were always the case..so I don't know if that is a factor or not. (I promise .. this is not a clever spammy attempt to promote their theme - in fact parts of it don't even work for me yet so I would not recommend it just yet...) I DO show up on the first page for my keyword.. however.. instead of Google showing the page www.mywebsite.com/this-is-my-targeted-keyword-page.htm Google shows www.mywebsite.com in the results instead. The problem being - if the traffic goes only to my home page.. they will be less likely to stay if they dont find what they want immediately and have to search for it.. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chunkyvittles0 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregelwell0 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0
