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.
What is the best strategy to SEO Discontinued Products on Ecommerce Sites?
-
RebelsMarket.com is a marketplace for alternative fashion. We have hundreds of sellers who have listed thousands of products. Over 90% of the items do not generate any sales; and about 40% of the products have been on the website for over 3+ years.
We want to cleanup the catalog and remove all the old listings that older than 2years that do not generate any sales. What is the best practice for removing thousands of listings an Ecommerce site? do we 404 these products and show similar items?
Your help and thoughts is much appreciated.
-
James, I would still make these as out of stock.
If these products don't get any organic search or traffic anyway, it is ok to re-direct them.
The message above was for established products that have been indexed by Google over a long period of time.
Please le the know if you have any questions. Also, if someone answer the question to your satisfaction you should mark the comment as a good comment
-
These are not out of stock products. These are items that don't sell and have not sold in years; We have listings older than 5yrs and do not have any sales at all.
You would mark them as out of stock?
-
Hi Cole
These are not out of stock products. These are items that don't sell and have not sold in years; We have listings older than 5yrs and do not have any sales at all.
You would mark them as out of stock?
-
I have countless clients that get HUGE traffic form products that they have "discontinued"
You worked so hard to get those products to display on Google, why would you throw away all of your traffic with a 301 redirect to a different product causing high bounce rates or even worse taking your visitors to a discontinued product page.
I would simply put an "Out of Stock" notice on that product and have related products below to direct your customers to similar products or maybe an add to waitlist, so if you decide to bring the product back you have immediate customers.
Amazon is a perfect example. For the most part, they do not delete or remove products. If you search a product that is no longer in stock at Amazon it will say out of stock, still allowing you to see multiple reviews on that product or other sellers offering similar products.
-
Hey,
If a product is out-of-stock temporarily, best practice is to link to alternative products, for example:
- Newer models or versions.
- Similar products from other brands.
- Other products in the same category that match in quality and price.
- The same product in different colours.
This provides a good service to customers and helps search engines find and understand related pages easier.
If a product is out-of-stock permanently there are three main options.
1: Product returns a 410 (or 404) Not Found status.
Google understands 410 and 404 Not Found pages are inevitable, but the problem with creating too many of them is it reduces the time search engine crawlers will spend visiting the pages that actually should rank. If this option is implemented, ideally there should be signposts to related products on the Not Found page.2. 301 permanently redirect old product to existing product (e.g. newer version or close alternative).
A dynamically generated message should clearly display on the page e.g. “Product X is no longer available. This is a similar product/the replacement product.”This option is recommended if redirect chains can be minimised, e.g. if product turnover is high the following could happen in a short timeframe:
- Product 1 no longer exists and gets 301 redirected to Product 2.
- Product 2 no longer exists and gets 301 redirected to Product 3.
- Now a redirect chain exists: Product 1 redirects to Product 2 which then redirects to Product 3. Product 1 would need to be updated to redirect to Product 3, without the intermediate redirect to Product 2.
3. 301 permanently redirect old product to parent category. A dynamically generated message should clearly display on the page e.g. “Product X is no longer available. Please see similar products below.”
As categories are likely to change less often than products, this is potentially easier to implement than option 2.
-
I'd 301 redirects from the discontinued lines to the main section pages, so
https://www.domain.com/product-type/a-red-sweater
would redirect to
https://www.domain.com/product-type/
-
Can't speak for everyone, but i had this same thing come up with our eCommerce website. We added a feature to our eCommerce store that allowed us to "discontinue" the product. Meaning that we removed the product from being searched or listed in our store. However, if you visited the page by direct URL the product page would load and say discontinued and display a list of related products in hopes the customer would not bounce.
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
-
Is toggle Good For seo
Hi there, I have Client Who dont want to show his content to publicly, So team decided to use toggle, So Google can also See Content, But i want bu sure. Does Google will really cache that Content?? Does it down my website Ranking?? Please any one can Help, I need urgent basis Thnx in advance Falguni
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Jul 13, 2017, 8:09 AM | iepl20010 -
Should I delete older posts on my site that are lower quality?
Hey guys! Thanks in advance for thinking through this with me. You're appreciated! I have 350 pieces of Cornerstone Content that has been a large focus of mine over the last couple years. They're incredibly important to my business. That said, less experienced me did what I thought was best by hiring a freelance writer to create extra content to interlink them and add relevancy to the overall site. Looking back through everything, I am starting to realize that this extra content, which now makes up 1/3 my site, is at about 65%-70% quality AND only gets a total of about 250 visitors per month combined -- for all 384 articles. Rather than spending the next 9 months and investing in a higher quality content creator to revamp them, I am seeing the next best option to remove them. From a pros perspective, do you guys think removing these 384 lower quality articles is my best option and focusing my efforts on a better UX, faster site, and continual upgrading of the 350 pieces of Cornerstone Content? I'm honestly at a point where I am ready to cut my losses, admit my mistakes, and swear to publish nothing but gold moving forward. I'd love to hear how you would approach this situation! Thanks 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Sep 20, 2016, 1:44 PM | ryj0 -
Does type of hosting affect SEO rankings?
Hello, I was wondering if hosting on shared, versus VPS, versus dedicated ... matter at all in terms of the rankings of Web sites ... given that all other factors would be exactly equal. I know this is a big question with many variables, but mainly I am wondering if, for example, it is more the risk of resource usage which may take a site down if too much traffic and therefore make it un-crawlable if it happens at the moment that a bot is trying to index the site (factoring out the UX of a downed site). Any and all comments are greatly appreciated! Best regards,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Nov 10, 2015, 11:38 AM | uworlds
Mark0 -
Negative SEO Click Bot Lowering My CTR?
I am questioning whether one of our competitors is using a click bot to do negative SEO on our CTR for our industry's main term. Is there any way to detect this activity? Background: We've previously been hit by DoS attacks from this competitor, so I'm sure their ethics/morals wouldn't prevent them from doing negative SEO. We sell an insurance product that is only offered through broker networks (insurance agents) not directly by the insurance carriers themselves. However, our suspect competitor (another agency) and insurance carriers are the only ones who rank on the 1st page for our biggest term. I don't think the carrier sites would do very well since they don't even sell the product directly (they have pages w/ info only) Our site and one other agency site pops onto the bottom of page one periodically, only to be bumped back to page 2. I fear they are using a click bot that continuously bounces us out of page 1...then we do well relatively to the other pages on page 2 and naturally earn our way back to page 1, only to be pushed back to page 2 by the negative click seo...is my theory. Is there anything I can do to research whether my theory is right or if I'm just being paranoid?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Jun 17, 2015, 10:34 AM | TheDude0 -
A site is using their competitors names in their Meta Keywords and Descriptions
I can't imagine this is a White Hat SEO technique, but they don't seem to be punished for it by Google - yet. How does Google treat the use of your competitors names in your meta keywords/descriptions? Is it a good idea?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Sep 6, 2013, 5:22 AM | PeterConnor0 -
Title Tag - Best Practices
I'm pretty new to seo but think I'm starting to get a decent grasp on it. One thing I'm really struggling with is how to organize the meta title tags on my website. I work in real estate and I'm noticing a lot of my local competitors that are ranking for the top keywords seem to using that particular keyword on every title tag within their website. An example would be www.paranych.com. Many of his internal pages have the word "Edmonton Real Estate" in the meta title tag, yet his home page is the page that is ranking for that particular keyword. It doesn't seem logical to have every one of my pages featuring the same keyword, but there are many examples within my industry of this working. Is the best practice with meta title tags to have your keyword on every title tag of your site or just the home page? Thx, Barry
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Nov 15, 2012, 5:57 PM | patrickmilligan0 -
White Papers! Is this still good for SEO
Does publishing a white paper good for SEO? We are trying to decide to publish one or not for the purpose of SEO. If it will not help, we will spend money for other things.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Jan 24, 2012, 12:15 PM | AppleCapitalGroup0 -
Recovering From Black Hat SEO Tactics
A client recently engaged my service to deliver foundational white hat SEO. Upon site audit, I discovered a tremendous amount of black hat SEO tactics employed by their former SEO company. I'm concerned that the efforts of the old company, including forum spamming, irrelevant backlink development, exploiting code vulnerabilities on BB's and other messy practices, could negatively influence the target site's campaigns for years to come. The site owner handed over hundreds of pages of paperwork from the old company detailing their black hat SEO efforts. The sheer amount of data is insurmountable. I took just one week of reports and tracked back the links to find that 10% of the accounts were banned, 20% tagged as abusive, some of the sites were shut down completely, WOT reports of abusive practices and mentions on BB control programs of blacklisting for the site. My question is simple. How does one mitigate the negative effects of old black hat SEO efforts and move forward with white hat solutions when faced with hundreds of hours of black gunk to clean up. Is there a clean way to eliminate the old efforts without contacting every site administrator and requesting removal of content/profiles? This seems daunting, but my client is a wonderful person who got in over her head, paying for a service that she did not understand. I'd really like to help her succeed. Craig Cook
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Nov 2, 2011, 3:04 PM | SEOptPro
http://seoptimization.pro
info@seoptimization.pro0