Magento E-Commerce Crawl Issues

[graeme1994]

Hi Guys,

First post here! I am responsible for a Magento e-commerce store and there are a few crawl issues and potential solutions that I am working and would like to get some advice to see if you agree with my approach.

Old Product Pages - The majority of our stock is seasonal, therefore when a product sells out, it is not usually going to come back into stock. However the approach for Magento websites is to leave the page present but take the product off the category pages, so users can still find these pages from the search engines and they are orphaned pages as not linked to from elsewhere and not totally clear products are out of stock (just doesn't show the size pulldown or 'Add to Basket' button). There is no process in place to 301 redirect these pages either.

My solution to this problem is to:

1. Change design of these pages so a clear message is shown to users that the product is out of stock and suggest related products to reduce bounce rates. I was also planning on having a link from an 'Out of Stock' page on the site to these products so they are orphaned but is this required do you think?

2. When I know for sure (e.g. over a month) that the product will not be returned (e.g. refund) by the user, then 301 redirect the product pages back to category page. How do other users 301 redirect their pages in Magento, I would like an easy to use system.

Crawl Errors Identified in Google Webmaster Tools

It seems in the last 2 weeks there has been a sharp increase in the number of soft 404 pages identified on the website. When I inspect these pages they seem to be categories and sub categories that no longer have any products in them.

However, I don't want to delete these pages as new products might come in and go onto these category pages, therefore how should I approach this? A suggestion I have thought of is to put related products on to these pages?

Any better ideas?

Thanks,

Graeme

[webmethod]

Hi Graeme,

For old product pages - your solution is good regarding showing users alternatives to the out of stock products. No need for an "out of stock page" as there's no value in that for crawlers or users. Regarding point 2 - if you redirect discontinued product pages to category pages that should be fine although Google may regard that as a soft 404. If there are loads of products like this and you 301 them in one go then the chances are it will flag up in Google WMT. If there are a small number and you introduce them gradually then you'll probably be fine.

For the crawl errors question, adding value to the pages in terms of related products is a good solution if that's viable and the pages will be different enough from each other (i.e. no duplicate content). One thing that isn't clear at the moment is if you're redirecting empty category pages all to the homepage - or if it's possible to redirect or canonical them to their parent category.

e.g. For home -> clothing -> men's clothing -> shoes

If all the men's shoes are discontinued, then redirect that page to men's clothing rather than to the homepage. This reduces your chances of getting a soft 404, and is also arguably a better user experience.

Hope that helps,

George