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.
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
-
White H1 Tag Hurting SEO?
Hi, We're having an issue with a client not wanting the H1 tag to display on their site and using an image of their logo instead. We made the H1 tag white (did not deliberately hide with CSS) and i just read an article where this is considered black hat SEO. https://www.websitemagazine.com/blog/16-faqs-of-seo The only reason we want to hide it is because it looks redundant appearing there along with the brand name logo. Does anyone have any suggestions? Would putting the brand logo image inside of an H1 tag be ok? Thanks for the help
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac261 -
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 | | iepl20010 -
Should I submit a sitemap for a site with dynamic pages?
I have a coupon website (http://couponeasy.com)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | shopperlocal_DM
Being a coupon website, my content is always keeps changing (as new coupons are added and expired deals are removed) automatically. I wish to create a sitemap but I realised that there is not much point in creating a sitemap for all pages as they will be removed sooner or later and/or are canonical. I have about 8-9 pages which are static and hence I can include them in sitemap. Now the question is.... If I create the sitemap for these 9 pages and submit it to google webmaster, will the google crawlers stop indexing other pages? NOTE: I need to create the sitemap for getting expanded sitelinks. http://couponeasy.com/0 -
The use of a ghost site for SEO purposes
Hi Guys, Have just taken on a new client (.co.uk domain) and during our research have identified they also have a .com domain which is a replica of the existing site but all links lead to the .co.uk domain. As a result of this, the .com replica is pushing 5,000,000+ links to the .co.uk site. After speaking to the client, it appears they were approached by a company who said that they could get the .com site ranking for local search queries and then push all that traffic to .co.uk. From analytics we can see that very little referrer traffic is coming from the .com. It sounds remarkably dodgy to us - surely the duplicate site is an issue anyway for obvious reasons, these links could also be deemed as being created for SEO gain? Does anyone have any experience of this as a tactic? Thanks, Dan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOBirmingham810 -
Off-page SEO and link building
Hi everyone! I work for a marketing company; for one of our clients' sites, we are working with an independent SEO consultant for on-page help (it's a large site) as well as off-page SEO. Following a meeting with the consultant, I had a few red flags with his off-page practices – however, I'm not sure if I'm just inexperienced and this is just "how it works" or if we should shy away from these methods. He plans to: guest blog do press release marketing comment on blogs He does not plan to consult with us in advance regarding the content that is produced, or where it is posted. In addition, he doesn't plan on producing a report of what was posted where. When I asked about these things, he told me they haven't encountered any problems before. I'm not saying it was spam-my, but I'm more not sure if these methods are leaning in the direction of "growing out of date," or the direction of "black-hat, run away, dude." Any thoughts on this would be crazy appreciated! Thanks, Casey
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CaseyDaline0 -
Site being targeted by hardcore porn links
We noticed recently a huge amount of referral traffic coming to a client's site from various hard cord porn sites. One of the sites has become the 4th largest referrer and there are maybe 20 other sites sending traffic. I did a Whois look up on some of the sites and they're all registered to various people & companies, most of them are pretty shady looking. I don't know if the sites have been hacked or are deliberately sending traffic to my client's site, but it's obviously a concern. The client's site was compromised a few months ago and had a bunch of spam links inserted into the homepage code. Has anyone else seen this before? Any ideas why someone would do this, what the risks are and how we fix it? All help & suggestions greatly appreciated, many thanks in advance. MB.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MattBarker0 -
Article submission, and how to build backlinks for Ecommerce? [HELP]
Hi guys, I have a question, for high quality backlinks apparently you go to these article websites where you submit your site such as Ezine etc etc, however is it just one article you submit to these as it'll look like duplicate content? Also can I have it on my site first? How does it work? Also I run an ecommerce website, how can I build backlinks to each product, theres over 200+ products and 1.6k subcategories. I would like to rank for as many as possible but getting an SEO company to do this would cost to much. Any ideas on how I should go about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | InkCartridgesFast1 -
Seo style="display: none;" ?
i want to have a funktion which shortens text in categorie view in my shop. apple is doing this in their product configurator see the "learn more" button at the right side: http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MC915LL/A apple is doing this by adding dynamic content but i want it more seo type by leaving the content indexable by google. i know from a search that this was used in the past years by black had seos to cover keywordstuffing. i also read an article at google. i beleive that this is years ago and keywordstuffing is completly no option anymore. so i beleive that google just would recognise it like the way its meant to be. but if i would not be sure i would not ask here 🙂 what do you think?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kynop0