How to Solve Mysteries for Disabled Products?

[CommercePundit]

I want to solve mysteries regarding disabled products on my eCommerce website. I want to give one example for my one product to know more about it.

Product URL: http://www.vistastores.com/indoorlighting-patiolivingconcepts-20947.html

Product Name: Floor Lamp in Monterey Bronze Finish

• Before 3 Months, This product was live on my website with In Stock status. Google have crawled that product, added in XML sitemap, added in Google merchant center, added in too many external website during link building campaign.
• Before 15 Days, This product was live on my website with Out of Stock status. Now, visitor can visit this page but, can not add in shopping cart.
• Now, This product is disabled from website and not available for sell. I have done lot of work to compile content, image, page rank and many other SEO stuffs to get rank with specific long trail keyword. This product is suddenly disabled from website so, it's shows 404 error and redirect to custom 404 error page.
• But, I am not satisfy with 301 redirect to set 302 redirect. But, is it really good?
• Is it require to set 301 or 302 redirect on disable products?
• I will never sell this product again on website. But, what about my indexing, external links, page authority?
• This is creating too many up an down in webmaster tools data, merchant center data, xml sitemap data and impression data.

What is best solution for it? Can any one share good example for eCommerce website.

[ShaMenz]

Hi there,

Unfortunately products that go out of stock are one of the biggest frustrations for ecommerce site managers. Where products are sourced from another company you can be very much at the mercy of the way that they manage their inventory. This means you need to decide which method of dealing with expired products will work best for you.

From what you have described it sounds like the product was marked temporary out of stock by the supplier, then more recently changed to "Do Not Reorder" status. So, the product has permanently expired and will not be restocked at any time in the future.

Your best option in this situation is a 301 redirect, which will pass link value from the page to whichever page you decide to redirect to. This is where you need to make decisions.

You have essentially 3 choices when choosing an appropriate page to set your redirect target.

1. If you have a product in your inventory that is very similar, you could redirect to that as the product may be of interest to people who were looking for the original product.
2. If you do not have a similar product, then you can redirect to the higher level category page for that item.
   For example, redirect to http://www.vistastores.com/lighting
3. Finally, since you have an internal search mechanism, you could choose to redirect to a search for a relevant term.
   For example, redirect to search ?q=lighting

The aim is to always send the visitor to the most relevant or helpful page to improve the chance of them converting.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[CommercePundit]

Oh... That's really great.. But, I don't want to set 301 redirect to associated products or category? You will ask that, why? Because, similar products are available on my product page. You can check any product page. So, user can find out similar product from there.

Another reasons are as follow.

• I am doing hard work to get ranking for specific product page. If I will set 301 redirect so Google will cut down my impression with that specific keyword.
• I have measured that, Google is not passing equal page rank or similar data to redirect page. If I have 50 products with 3 page rank so it's not that much beneficial to me.
• Web designer, product mangers and similar other people are working to hard to decor any product page. So, why should I redirect that page to any where after hard work?
• You are right as per SEO point of view but, it is over my head. Why why why I redirect any one to my bedroom after decor entire living room with full of light?

[ShaMenz]

Hi again,

Currently you have that product number listed under two different URL's

http://www.vistastores.com/indoorlighting-patiolivingconcepts-20947.html is returning a 301

http://www.vistastores.com/floor-lamps-patio-living-concepts-20947.html is returning a 404.

There are those who would say that it is perfectly fine to return a 404 as long as the 404 page contains proper navigation links and access to other products etc.

I do not disagree with their opinion as far as what should be on the page that is returned (your custom 404 page does this), but in the case of an ecommerce site, I disagree that it is a good idea to just let all expired products return 404 errors.

The nature of ecommerce is such that this will eventually result in search engines seeing an ever-growing list of broken links on your site. With large ecommerce sites, this could result in thousands of 404 errors which the search engine will see no attempt is ever made to correct or reduce.

If you choose to allow searchers to be sent to your custom 404 page, I take a different approach:

• Name the custom 404 page something innocuous like /custom-introduction
• Remove the 404 references from the Title, description and page text - just use a simple explanation that the product is no longer available and invite the visitor to select from the categories available to search for another product, without mentioning the term "404 not found"
• add a catch-all 301 redirect which sends any request for a page that does not exist on the server to /custom-introduction.

By doing this you will avoid creating an ever growing list of 404's, but as I said, there are those who don't worry about that at all.

As to not using 301's because you have put all that work into the pages, if they are disabled in your store the content will no longer be visible to the search engines anyway. As much as we all hate having our hard work seemingly come to nothing like this, it is very much the nature of the business in ecommerce. Products come and go all the time. This is exactly why the 301 redirect is the best option - because it passes almost all of the link value to the new page. So your hard work has not been wasted, but helped to improve the value of another page on the site.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[CommercePundit]

It's really good explanation. I am going to set redirect. But not 301 but, 302. Because, I want to drill down more on same subject and will find out alternative solution with my problem.

I am not opposing you. I am picking parallel solution [~302 instead of 301] what you recommend.

BTW: Thanks for your time on my question. I am still not mark it as answered. Let's see what happen in next response.