Stock lists - follow of nofollow?

[ben_dpp]

a bit of a catch 22 position here that i could use some advice on please!

We look after a few Car dealership sites that have daily (some 3 times a day) stock feeds that add and remove cars form the site, which in turn removes/creates pages for each vehicle.

We all know how much search engines like sites that have content that is updated regularly but the frequency it happens on our sites means we are left with lots of indexed pages that are no longer there.

now my question is should i nofollow/disallow robots on all the pages that are for the details of the vehicles meaning the list pages will still be updated daily for "new content" or allow google to index everything and manage the errors to redirect to relevant pages?

is there a "best practice" way to do this or is it really personal preference?

[Hutch42]

My thoughts are instead of worrying about what is best for Google, think of what will give a user the best experience and go with that.  While it is nice to have a lot of pages index, if by the time they get to Google they are gone, what good does that do a visitor who was searching for a specific term that your site no longer offers? They are much more likely to leave which will effect your whole site negativity as bounces from search go up.

[ben_dpp]

Thanks for the response.

The two routes i was looking at are both for the user. i'm looking at either not allowing search engines to serve the content that can expire, or redirecting them to similar vehicles/relevant content within the site.

i was purely wondering which would have additional benefits with google, as the first option is the easier of the two development wise.

[donford]

Hi Ben,

Is it possible to create a basic sold page with some dynamic info about the vehicle. After the vehicle becomes sold or no longer available then 301 the old page to the sold page populated with the vehicle info with parameters and some possible other buying choices.

For example:

siteblah.com/Make/Moldel/Year/short-car-desciption
When sold, 301 page to:

siteblah.com/Vehicles/Sold/Vehicle-Sold.php?listing-id='12222190'

The benefit here is the old page sends the new page the link juice so you don't lose that. With content the customer understands the car is sold, and providing them with actionable options. The search engines learn about the new page and can treat as such. Additionally you'd only have to create one new page and plugin the parameters. Every 3 months or so you can probably remove the old pages and the 301 redirect depending on server performance.

[Hutch42]

The idea of redirecting a user to a car that might not match their search does not seem like a very user friendly option, if they wanted a mustang and clicked a search listing for it but none are available and were then redirected to a camaro page the user would not be happy, and that flow is built only for the site and not the customer, IMO.

[EGOL]

I would take the "aggregation" route.

Instead of having lots of pages for each make and model of vehicle, I would make single pages that list all of the vehicles of a single make and model.  These pages would be more substantive, permanent, impressive, useful, competitive, than a lot of skimply single pages that appear and disappear from your website.

Competitors are probably not doing this because it is difficult instead of easy.   Put checkboxes down the side of the page that visitors can "check to compare".