Ecommerce catalog update: 301 redirects?

[yacpro13]

Hello mozers,

We run an ecommerce store and are planning a massive catalog update this month. Essentially, 100% of our product listings will be deleted, and an all new catalog will be uploaded. The new catalog contains mostly new products, however there are some products that already existing in the old catalog as well.

The new catalog has a bunch of improvements to the product pages, included optimized meta titles and descriptions, multiple language, optimized URLs and more.

My question is the following:

When we delete the existing catalog, all indexed URLs will return 404 errors. Setting up 301 redirects from old to new products (for products which existing previously) is not feasible given the number of products. Also, many products are simply being remove entirely.

So should we go ahead and delete all products, upload the new catalog, update the sitemap, resubmit it for crawling, and live with a bunch of 404 errors until these URLs get dropped from Google?

The alternative I see is setting 301 redirects to the home page, but I am not sure this would be correct use of 301 redirects.

Thanks for your input.

[LoganRay]

You should definitely not let those URLs die. Having a ton of 404 errors is a sure fire way to have Google demote your site for poor quality. I recommend selecting your top 100 or so products, based on Google Analytics traffic numbers and importance to your business, and apply one-to-one 301 redirects for those. The rest of the old products can be redirected to the homepage, or maybe the main store page.

[DirkC]

I don't fully agree with the answer above - having 404's is not a direct cause for demoting. Check https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html . Another interesting video on expired e-commerce products is here: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882. Redirecting to the homepage (or any other non related page) is certainly not a good thing - this would be considered a soft 404.

It is however best practice to redirect products that remain in the catalog to the newer versions of the page. Even for those that don't remain in catalog you might consider to redirect them to a closely related new product. You indicate that given the number of products this would be not feasible. Are there no common patterns in the url to redirect these pages in bulk? Is it possible to put the redirect in the page header?

Redirects (properly implemented = going to the corresponding content) are both good for users & Google. If you don't redirect it will take some time before the new products are indexed and replacing the old ones in the ranking - which will almost certainly lead to rank loss: the 404 results will quickly disappear from the results and it will take a lot longer for the new ones to take their positions, it they manage to get back to these positions at all.

If you happen to have links point to these old product pages - you will loose these as well if they go to a 404.

In case that redirects is indeed not a valid option - make sure that you have a custom 404 pages so that user can easily find what their looking for. It might reduce the damage a bit.

If it was my site  - I would try to find a solution to implement 301's.

Dirk

[yacpro13]

Thanks for the info.

In my books a 301 redirect is for a direct replacement of an old webpage for a new one. I knew a bunch of 404 errors would be problematic, but I was also worried setting up 301 redirects to the home page (which is not a replacement for the product page being removed) would not agree with best practices.

Also good point regarding existing incoming links pointing to the pages being removed.

I think what we'll do is export URLs from the Google index, and either set a 301 redirect to the new product page (if it exists) or if not we'll 301 redirect to that product's category page.