Managing 404 Product Pages

[JMSCC]

Happy Friday!

I'm managing an Ecommerce site that has tons of product pages showing up as 404s. These product pages also have ridiculous query strings. I wanted to know how other webmasters deal with inactive product pages. Thanks!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

What I would do is first review this resource from Matt Cutts on how to handle out of stock products moving forward for your inventories. This will help you handle 404s and redirects in the future.

From there, what you can do is see what URLs should not be crawled and indexed based on query strings. See which ones you should noindex, disallow, or nofollow, but you can also let Google know which parameters to ignore in Search Console. When doing all of this, I hiiiiighly recommend having a professional handle this. Reason being - you don't want to inadvertently noindex pages that should be being indexed, or have a ton of redirects happening when they don't need to be.

Let me know if this helps or doesn't fully answer your question! Good luck!
Patrick

[RickyShockley]

For inactive product pages I think it's usually best to send them to a 404 page. I'd make sure the 404 page includes a nice index of product categories and a mention that the product or page they were looking for is out of stock.

These pages don't usually contain much link value, so you shouldn't worry too much about having to set up 301s to similar products etc.

-RIcky

[HashtagHustler]

The ONLY last thing I would add.

I'm sure you will notice a lot of eCommerce websites will keep products that they don't sell anymore, and just keep them as "sold out". People still hit those products and land on those pages.

Check and see how often people are hitting these products. If some of these pages have some juice left, it might be worth recreating a page in its place for a product that isn't being sold anymore and up sell for something you are selling. Or as Ricky said above me, 301 them.

Don't just prune everything at once. Slow and steady wins the race. Make sure you know what you are cutting before you cut it.