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My web site previously offered several categories of an indoor type of product, which have since been permanently discontinued. We do still offer a full line of the outdoor type of these products. The usage is quite different (indoor vs. outdoor), and customers looking for the indoor variety are not likely to be immediately interested in the outdoor ones. But the pages for the discontinued categories and products have built up significant page authority and rank quite well even for more generic searches which are not indoor or outdoor specific. I am interested in opinions on what approach to take for the discontinued category pages and product pages.

Currently, the discontinued pages are accessible by direct link, but have been removed from the site's navigation menus and on-site search. The pages include some messaging for visitors to inform that we no longer offer this type of product, with some links to active categories.

We can remove these pages and serve a 404 error page. Or, we can redirect these pages to the outdoor product category (but all would have to be redirected to a single category, as the specific outdoor categories and products don't map logically to specific indoor ones). Or, we can keep as-is.

I am interested in opinions on approach, either between these options above, or other alternatives.

We are seeing the following trend in our rankings and traffic after the recent Google algorithm updates (May 2015 quality/phantom, and July 2015 Panda), and I am curious if anyone here has encountered similar and/or has any good ideas on how to react.

Background - we operate in a niche segment, but compete for keywords with large home improvement stores and mass retailers.

In the past, prior to May 2015, we generally ranked higher than the large home improvement stores and mass retailers for our key specific terms in our niche. We believed that it was because we have a very specialized focus and so our store was highly relevant for someone searching in that niche (for example for the name of the product category as a keyword). In general, we ranked #1-3. Along with a few of our competitors in our niche. And then would be the big box home improvement stores in spots 5-10.

The change we saw starting in May is that now all the home improvement stores and also a few large multi-category retailers took over those top 5 spots and bumped all the specialty retailers and the specialty brand manufacturers (like us) down. Our direct competitors in our niche all seem to have been impacted pretty much the same as us.

So, in summary it seems like these latest updates may have favored the more general retailers but with stronger domain authority than the more specific but smaller retailers. Hard to know for sure, but this is the trend we believe we see.

So, that said, what are some good strategies to respond to this situation? We can't really compete on overall domain authority with these huge retailers. And our previously successful strategy of having a very focused niche, with lots of helpful content, videos, instructional guides, etc. no longer seems to be enough.

Has anyone else seen similar results since this past May? Where specialty retail or brand sites lost ground to larger general retailers? And if so, has anyone found any good strategies to gain back their previous rankings, or at least partially?

Thank you for the details Nathan. I will contact Volusion directly. But to summarize for any other users happening upon this thread:

The answer to your question is that no, we are not planing to change all of our URLs at once. This will be an ongoing need, perhaps maybe 10 URLs per month on a continuing basis. The scenario is that in the past, when we made an engineering change to our products, we did not generally issue a new product code in Volusion. But for tracking, warranty, and UL listing purposes, going forward, we need to begin issuing new product codes when engineering changes occur. So, when we make a form/fit/function change to a product 12345-A, we will need to create a new product 12345-B.

The solution of canonical relationship links is not applicable here, because we are not just talking about SEO. Any visitor who arrives on 12345-A need to be taken to 12345-B. The canonical will help the search engines avoid duplicate indexing, but it is just as important for us to manage the visits of real users (who may arrive from links other than those in search engine results). So, we need a redirect. Volusion does provide a method for this (http://support.volusion.com/article/using-redirects-products-volusion), but this method issues a 302 redirect which is not desirable for SEO purposes.

And Volusion also provides a method for administering 301 redirects, but only when the requested page does not exist.

So, in the reply from Nathan above, he is recommending to physically delete the old product from the database so that the original page does not exist, and set up redirects using the Volusion application, after the deletion has been done.

There are some details to be considered when taking this approach, so we are going to contact Volusion directly to work through those. But I wanted to summarize here to help others who may have a similar need. Nathan, if I've incorrectly summarized, please add-on. Thanks.

Nathan,

We have a very similar question, and would like your opinion. We are also a Volusion customer, and in the near future will need to create new revisions of many of our existing product codes. For tracking reasons, we wish to create a new product code. Because Volusion can only perform a redirect when the original requested page does not exist, we were planning to use this procedure here: http://support.volusion.com/article/using-redirects-products-volusion.

However, when we tested this procedure, which seems to apply to our scenario, the Volusion application issues a 302 redirect instead of a 301 redirect. And I'm very hesitant to use this because 302 redirects evidently pass 0% link juice (https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection).

Nakul above wrote that possibly a combination of the 302 redirect PLUS a canonical might be the solution. However, I'm not yet sure if the canonical tag on the child product would be followed if the page has already redirected (via 302) to the parent page.

Do you have any insight you can share on this, specific to how Volusion recommends to handle this scenario?

Monica, we have some similar errors showing up on our Volusion pages as well. I know this is an old thread, but do you happen to remember what you did to resolve this?