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.
How big is the problem: 404-errors as result of out of stock products?
-
We had a discussion about the importance of 404-errors as result of products which are out of stock. Of course this is not good, but what is the leverance in terms of importance: low-medium-high?
-
They are mostly permanently out of stock / out of collection. Based on research and your reactions we want to 301 redirect them to the relevant category page. The number of 404 errors in webmaster tools are quite substancial.
The ones which are not permanently out of stock but temporarily unavailable we want to maintain the product page with a comment that the product will be orderable soon.
-
A few questions need to be answered. Primarily:
- Are these coming back in stock?
- Were these popular products?
If these products are coming back in stock, this is a big problem and you need to have your team work to find a solution to have these pages maintain a 200. You could be losing your spot in the rankings every time you run out of inventory, missing out on a lot of traffic and cross-selling opportunities.
If the products are gone and not coming back, this isn't a big problem, as it is something every e-comm deals with. Having a plan to handle this is important though.
Some basic options include:
- Keep out of stock product pages active on web, serving up a 200. Be sure the content is updated clearly to show that the item is Out of Stock and it also serves up a bunch of additional, closely related alternative
- Let the removed products 404. Redirect these URLs to the parent subcategory level. This is possible for sites with a moderate amount of SKUs and low turnover.
- Let the removed products 404. Hand pick the popular products to set-up 301 redirects for to subcategory or similar product. Maintain by watching 404s in Google Webmaster Tools, looking for 404 pages in OSE/ahrefs, etc.
-
Are the products discontinued or out of stock? In my opinion, the 404 errors are only detrimental to your SEO when they are in an overabundance. Relevant 404 errors are important, not just for Google, but for the searcher as well. They need to know that a product has been discontinued. If a product is just out of stock, I wouldn't 404 it at all.
This is a video by Matt Cutts on how Google handles 404 errors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oya9Pl7ukNo
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
-
Product schema GSC Error 'offers, review, or aggregateRating should be specified'
I do not have a sku, global identifier, rating or offer for my product. Nonetheless it is my product. The price is variable (as it's insurance) so it would be inappropriate to provide a high or low price. Therefore, these items were not included in my product schema. SD Testing tool showed 2 warnings, for missing sku and global identifier. Google Search Console gave me an error today that said: 'offers, review, or aggregateRating should be specified' I don't want to be dishonest in supplying any of these, but I also don't want to have my page deprecated in the search results. BUT I DO want my item to show up as a product. Should I forget the product schema? Advice/suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Intermittent 404 - What causes them and how to fix?
Hi! I'm working on a client site at the moment and I've discovered a couple of pages that are 404ing but producing a 200 OK response. However, I have checked these URLs again and some are now producing a 404 Error response. No changes have been made (that I'm aware of) so it appears that the URLs are returning both 200 OK and 404 Error responses intermittently. Any ideas what could cause this and the best solution? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | daniel-brooks0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Product Variations (rel=canonical or 301) & Duplicate Product Descriptions
Hi All, Hoping for a bit of advice here please, I’ve been tasked with building an e-commerce store and all is going well so far. We decided to use Wordpress with Woocommerce as our shop plugin. I’ve been testing the CSV import option for uploading all our products and I’m a little concerned on two fronts: - Product Variations Duplicate content within the product descriptions **Product Variations: - ** We are selling furniture that has multiple variations (see list below) and as a result it creates c.50 product variations all with their own URL’s. Facing = Left, Right Leg style = Round, Straight, Queen Ann Leg colour = Black, White, Brown, Wood Matching cushion = Yes, No So my question is should I 301 re-direct the variation URL’s to the main product URL as from a user perspective they aren't used (we don't have images for each variation that would trigger the URL change, simply drop down options for the user to select the variation options) or should I add the rel canonical tag to each variation pointing back to the main product URL. **Duplicate Content: - ** We will be selling similar products e.g. A chair which comes in different fabrics and finishes, but is basically the same product. Most, if not all of the ‘long’ product descriptions are identical with only the ‘short’ product descriptions being unique. The ‘long’ product descriptions contain all the manufacturing information, leg option/colour information, graphics, dimensions, weight etc etc. I’m concerned that by having 300+ products all with identical ‘long’ descriptions its going to be seen negatively by google and effect the sites SEO. My question is will this be viewed as duplicate content? If so, are there any best practices I should be following for handling this, other than writing completely unique descriptions for each product, which would be extremely difficult given its basically the same products re-hashed. Many thanks in advance for any advice.
Technical SEO | | Jon-S0 -
Is Google suppressing a page from results - if so why?
UPDATE: It seems the issue was that pages were accessible via multiple URLs (i.e. with and without trailing slash, with and without .aspx extension). Once this issue was resolved, pages started ranking again. Our website used to rank well for a keyword (top 5), though this was over a year ago now. Since then the page no longer ranks at all, but sub pages of that page rank around 40th-60th. I searched for our site and the term on Google (i.e. 'Keyword site:MySite.com') and increased the number of results to 100, again the page isn't in the results. However when I just search for our site (site:MySite.com) then the page is there, appearing higher up the results than the sub pages. I thought this may be down to keyword stuffing; there were around 20-30 instances of the keyword on the page, however roughly the same quantity of keywords were on each sub pages as well. I've now removed some of the excess keywords from all sections as it was getting in the way of usability as well, but I just wanted some thoughts on whether this is a likely cause or if there is something else I should be worried about.
Technical SEO | | Datel1 -
Trailing Slash Problems
Link juice being split between trailing slash and non versions. ie. ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk and ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk/ Initially asked in here and was told to do a rewrite in the htaccess file. I don't have access to this with squarespace, nor can I add canonical tags on a page by page basis. 301 redirect from scentsy-uk to scentsy-uk/ didn't work either...said that the redirect wasn't completing in an error message on the browser. Squarespace hasn't been very helpful at all. My question is....is there another way to fix this? or should I just call it a day with squarespace and move to wordpress?
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
Google's "cache:" operator is returning a 404 error.
I'm doing the "cache:" operator on one of my sites and Google is returning a 404 error. I've swapped out the domain with another and it works fine. Has anyone seen this before? I'm wondering if G is crawling the site now? Thx!
Technical SEO | | AZWebWorks0 -
How to find links to 404 pages?
I know that I used to be able to do this, but I can't seem to remember. One of the sites I am working on has had a lot of pages moving around lately. I am sure some links got lost in the fray that I would like to recover, what is the easiest way to see links going to a domain that are pointing to 404 pages?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0