What to do with sold product pages when everything you sell are unique one off items
-
Hi there,
This is something i have been unsure of for years. It's a little different to most ecom website situations. What would you do with product pages when every product is a "one off" unique product and once sold will never be for sale again?
Should i redirect to a category page? 404? Leave it as is marked as sold or say it is sold and show links to similar items?
At the moment we have 700 products for sale but over 5000 sold products that have their own product page and my concern is as this grows it could become a lot for a WordPress woocommerce site to handle?
I don't want to do anything to slow my site down or unnecessarily bloat it but i want to do the right thing by the visitor and also not do anything to hurt my rankings.
These pages often rank in google and may have been there for years before the item actually sells. To throw another curve ball, there may be multiple other products (for sale or already sold) with the exact same name but are unique and different from each other.
These products pages will often be 98% the same content as each other too.
To explain how this could be the case, we sell artworks from many different artists, Every artwork is an original and is unique. But many artists paint the same subject matter multiple times, albeit in a slightly different way from previous times.
So you end up with a unique product that has everything the same as another (same artist, same name of artwork, same size, same description, different image, different sku) but is actually different and unique.
This has left me somewhat uncertain of what is best to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you
-
Without being able to see the site, here are some steps I would recommend taking:
- 404 all sold products
- Ensure users must enter unique titles, descriptions, images. Even if they create something similar, these aspects could be unique
- Show "Similar Products" for all sold pieces
Redirecting technically isn't the best practice unless the destination is very similar. As well, this will slow down your site's server response times if done at scale. Allowing them as 200 status codes will create a lot of duplicate content it seems.
If you send the site, I could take a further look here!
-
We also have problems. For example, on the page [https://www.fitness-china.com/back-machine](https://www.fitness-china.com/back-machine "lat pulldown"), we have many **Lat Pulldown**. They are all products that **exercise back muscles**. Every year we release new products. Such products are also included. Need to write different product descriptions.
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
-
Fresh page versus old page climbing up the rankings.
Hello, I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings. However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Will Reducing Number of Low Page Authority Page Increase Domain Authority?
Our commercial real estate site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) contains about 800 URLs. Since 2012 the domain authority has dropped from 35 to about 20. Ranking and traffic dropped significantly since then. The site has about 791 URLs. Many are set to noindex. A large percentage of these pages have a Moz page authority of only "1". It is puzzling that some pages that have similar content to "1" page rank pages rank much better, in some cases "15". If we remove or consolidate the poorly ranked pages will the overall page authority and ranking of the site improve? Would taking the following steps help?: 1. Remove or consolidate poorly ranking unnecessary URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Update content on poorly ranking URLs that are important?
3. Create internal text links (as opposed to links from menus) to critical pages? A MOZ crawl of our site's URLs is visible at the link below. I am wondering if the structure of the site is just not optimized for ranking and what can be done to improve it. THANKS. https://www.dropbox.com/s/oqchfqveelm1q11/CRAWL www.nyc-officespace-leader.com (1).csv?dl=0 Thanks,
Alan0 -
How to 301 Redirect /page.php to /page, after a RewriteRule has already made /page.php accessible by /page (Getting errors)
A site has its URLs with php extensions, like this: example.com/page.php I used the following rewrite to remove the extension so that the page can now be accessed from example.com/page RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rcseo
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L] It works great. I can access it via the example.com/page URL. However, the problem is the page can still be accessed from example.com/page.php. Because I have external links going to the page, I want to 301 redirect example.com/page.php to example.com/page. I've tried this a couple of ways but I get redirect loops or 500 internal server errors. Is there a way to have both? Remove the extension and 301 the .php to no extension? By the way, if it matters, page.php is an actual file in the root directory (not created through another rewrite or URI routing). I'm hoping I can do this, and not just throw a example.com/page canonical tag on the page. Thanks!0 -
When removing a product page from an ecommerce site?
What is the best practice for removing a product page from an Ecommerce site? If a 301 is not available and the page is already crawled by the search engine A. block it out in the robot.txt B. let it 404
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Howcome Google is indexing one day 2500 pages and the other day only 150 then 2000 again ect?
This is about an big affiliate website of an customer of us, running with datafeeds... Bad things about datafeeds: Duplicate Content (product descriptions) Verrryyyy Much (thin) product pages (sometimes better to noindex, i know, but this customer doesn't want to do that)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Links to images on a page diluting page value?
We have been doing some testing with additional images on a page. For example, the page here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/files/2550/sukhoi-su-27-flanker-package-for-fsx/ Notice the images under the heading Images/Screenshots After adding these images, we noticed a ranking drop for that page (-27 places) in the SERPS. Could the large amount of images - in particular the links on the images (links to the larger versions) be causing it to dilute the value of the actual page? Any suggestions, advice or opinions will be much appreciated.0 -
URL for New Product
Hi, We run an established website (mindflash.com) selling online training software. We are getting ready to launch a new section of the site where our users can sell their own online training programs. This will be branded as the 'marketplace'. This section will have a main page, category pages, tag pages, search and individual course pages. In our URL structure, I'd love to target the word 'training courses' but I don't want to neglect the product brand either. Is it better to use /training-courses in the marketplace urls or to use /marketplace? Or is it better to use both like /marketplace-training-courses or /marketplace/training-courses? Option 1: Example main section page: mindflash.com/training-courses Example category page: mindflash.com/training-courses/software-training Option 2: Example main section page: mindflash.com/marketplace Example category page: mindflash.com/marketplace/software-training Option 3: Example main section page: mindflash.com/marketplace-training-courses Example category page: mindflash.com/marketplace-training-courses/software-training Option 4: Example main section page: mindflash.com/marketplace/training-courses Example category page: mindflash.com/marketplace/training-courses/software-training Which option is better and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0 -
Max # of Products / Links per Page on E-Commerce Site
We are getting ready to re-launch our e-commerce site and are trying to decide how many products to list per category page. Some of of our category pages have upwards of 100 products. While I'd love to list ALL the products on the root category page (to reduce hassle for customer, to index more products on a higher PR page), I'm a little worried about having it be too long, and containing too many on-page links. Would love some guidance on: Maximum number of internal links on a page If Google frowns on really long category pages Anything else I should be considering when making this decision Thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY2