When products are discontinued- best way to handle pinned or googled images

[stephenfishman]

What do you lose by deleting a product and it's images from an e-commerce site? We have many product images with pinterest pins and shares or that show up on google images searches. Our site is an active American craft gallery with jewelry, art and handmade gifts from about 300 different artists. Most products are made in small quantities others are 1 of a kind. So we often have products selling out.  Most items are organized by artist.

Are there good practices to follow that will best keep our social media presence and links?  I'd also like to stop buying extra space for all those images on my server

Thanks so much

Stephen

[Dandelion]

Hi Stephen,

While I can't offer you the definitive answer to your question, I wanted to share an idea. I recently started using a plug-in called Redirection on one of my sites. When I started working with it I was surprised to see how much traffic was coming to old images and that I could set up a redirect for them.  I had not really considered the idea of setting a 301's for individual images.

Reading your issue my thought was maybe you set up some pages  - more friendly and useful than a 404 - that say how the product is discontinued, but maybe they would like such and such instead...something still trying to help them out. So maybe you have a page like that for each artist. Then set up 404's for the popular but discontinued image that goes to one of those custom pages.

Good luck!

[stephenfishman]

Hi Dandelion and Thank You for the response..

When you said "Then set up 404's for the popular but discontinued image" did you mean to say "set up 301's"?

And may I ask how do you discover exact images?  I am not using wordpress and don't know of any add-ons that help ..

Best wishes

Stephen 
(sorry for the delay in responding-- been having email issues..)

[Dandelion]

Yes! That is what I definitely meant to say. My apologies for the confusion!

In my case, I was able to discover the exact images because the plugin tells me what files were requested but not found each week. If you aren't using wordpress - hmmm, it has been a while since i managed a large non-wordpress site.

But i think there is a report in Google Analytics that tells you the file not found pages and maybe it had the images too.  Or maybe I am thinking of Web Trends analytics. Your Google Search Console might be a good resource - it has lots of crawl data. Screaming frog might be able to find them - it has so many reports I would not be surprised. I'm sorry I don't know for sure.

I'll be curious what you find!

[stephenfishman]

Dandelion-

I'll look at both those and let you know

Stephen

[Dandelion]

Stephen,

I just came across this article that says it will show you how to find your 404 errors using Google Analytics. I thought you might still be interested.

https://www.rebelytics.com/404-errors-google-analytics/

Dandelion

[stephenfishman]

Thank you--   That's looks like a great resource- still working on this and appreciate your input

Stephen