Old / passed productpages

[Leonie-Kramer]

Hi, what shall i do with the old / passed productpages? The situation right now is, that all product url's are being saved wich cost me a lot of duplicate content and lot's of url's being indexed and crawled and no use to the website at all.

As there are affiliate links to those passed url's i want to give them a 301 to the category page wicht fitst best for a time of period?

Do you think that's the best solution? And what time of period shall ik give those 301 redirects?

Thnx and grtz, Leonie

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

Firstly Affilaite links usually don't help towards SEO as they go through the affiliate company i.e. Awin, so the link juice actually is passed to awin, not yourself.

Once a product has sold out on our site, we 301 to the category page as this is the best user experience, while they can't get the exact product they are after at least they are still landing on a relevant section of the site - I've seen some examples where companies 301 to the homepage, but this isn't a good user experience.

Time periods for the 301s is a bit hard to say, I would track and see if they haven't had anybody click on the old link for 6 months to remove the 301 - but thats my opinion. Some would argue longer and I have spoken to others who say three months. What ever time period you do chose, keep an eye on 404 errors and if a decent number of these keep popping up, keep extending your 301 window.

Thanks

Andy

[Leonie-Kramer]

Thanks Andy. i know affliate don't help SEO, but have 404 errors through the affiliate company, trying to solve it, but have to take care at this right now.about the time: difficult to say what's good,  will monitore it the next period. 6 months sounds reasonable, though that are lots of 301 's

[donford]

Hi Leonie

I am not completely against 301's for these situations but from a user experience level I don't like when I got to X url and end up at Y url. I understand the reason from an SEO perspective but I don't like it from a user perspective. I take this into account when I make my decisions for my personal sites as well as my company's.

For e-commerce sites I prefer one of two methods. For products that "may" one day return I prefer to leave the page up, disable checkout / add to cart features and provide users similar buying choices along with an out of stock "email me when available again" option.

For products that will likely never be available again I still prefer to leave the page up, provide alternatives for them to buy, and then canonical the URL to parent. The second option works in two ways. First you don't miss the traffic from others linking to you, second you give the page's credit back to the parent category while reducing the no longer available page's chance of being a SERP result and up the parent's. Eventually the page will fall off the SERPs. Once a year you can do a sweep to see if any of the no longer available pages are getting any views if not then just remove them.

Both options provides users a better experience then "O you want to go here, O, I say you go here!" that 301's induce. I am not saying there is no place for 301's, in this sort of case I think the alternatives maybe a tad better, though maybe a little harder to implement.

[Leonie-Kramer]

Thanks Donford, you really got a point to see it from a user perpective. and want to consider this also as an option and using the canonical of the parent.i'm talking about productpages that won't return anymore. For pages that will, we already cover like the way you described.

grtz, Leonie

[Andy-Halliday]

I would disagree, I would prefer to be taken to the sub category page to show me similar products with a message saying the product you was looking for is no longer available, please check out these very similar products - but I guess we all have different tastes and thats why as webmasters we can never please everybody

[donford]

It takes all kinds :).  I think to me maybe a learned response any time I click a link and see a redirect unless I implicitly trust the site I'm alt+f4'ing right away. I don't want popups, I don't want redirects I want to go where I say to go, even if where I said to go is empty. At least I got there and now can make a conscience choice what to do next.

Maybe just preference.

[EricaMcGillivray]

Definitely look at traffic and conversions, and start with those.

Also, re: affiliates, are the affiliates themselves complaining about 404s? Most any affiliate programs/management systems have the ability to shut off links. I assume they then inform affiliates to change links.

[Leonie-Kramer]

Hi Erica,

yes they have,  and they are shutting of those links, but still encounter 404's from the affiliate company. it's is progress

[Leonie-Kramer]

Well i decided to give old product pages a 301 redirect, as long there is traffic on the url's, this wil be the best solution for this site. To leave the page up with a canonical, will create a messy site at the end. Thanx for all your replies!

Grtz, Leonie