When removing a product page from an ecommerce site?

[Bryan_Loconto]

What is the best practice for removing a product page from an Ecommerce site?

If a 301 is not available and the page is already crawled by the search engine

A. block it out in the robot.txt

B. let it 404

[Schwaab]

I would create a custom 404 page that gives users options of similar products or product categories.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Right the questions is regarding crawlability, link juice etc..

[ReferralCandy]

Hi Bryan,

There are various reasons to remove a product page from an eCommerce store. Before deciding to remove a product page, you should consider if removing it will in fact help your SEO. If not, you need to look into alternatives such as 301 redirects or informing visitors in the old product pages that the product is no longer available. I'm not sure why performing 301 redirects is not an option for you - you may want to consider trying to get access to do this.

We have written an article some time ago about the different scenarios an eCommerce store will face when deciding to remove old product pages, and how to deal with each scenario: http://blog.referralcandy.com/2011/12/14/how-to-remove-old-products/

Hope that helps!

[Bryan_Loconto]

Okay the question is regarding indexing, I should of been more specific.

If we are removing 100 product pages from an ecommerce site because they barely convert (regardless of a nice 404 page) and we cannot transfer the user to a relevant page. Is it a best to leave the pages live? or remove them (404) and block them in the robots.txt file?

[Everett]

Bryan,

If I were removing 100 product pages from an eCommerce site because they barely convert I would approach it this way:

#1. Run the URls through a tool to see which ones have external backlinks.
Often times none of the pages will have any external backlinks, and those that do are usually not very good. If this is the case - or if you "really" aren't able to do any 301 redirects (and if so that's something that needs to be fixed) - skip to step #3. Otherwise...

#2. 301 redirect those with external backlinks to the most relevant page, be that a similar product or the category page directly above the product to be removed. Try to avoid redirecting them all to the homepage or some other "catch all" page, as these may be treated like a 404 by Google.

#3. Simply remove the pages and show the custom 404 page that suggests other products, or whatever messaging you want to show there (e.g. "This product has been removed from our catalog. Please see these other products...") and be sure to check the http header response code (lots of free tools for that) to ensure these URLs actually serve a 404 response (note: This should show up on the removed URL, as opposed to redirecting the visitor to another page like .../404.html).

#4. Since the now-removed URLs are not linked to from anywhere, either internally or externally, it could take awhile for Google to recrawl them and see the 404 error. If you need this to happen more quickly, such as when dealing with duplicate manufacturer descriptions and removal of page to recover from Panda, it may be wise to provide some type of html sitemap file listing out the URLs long enough for Google to recrawl them.

I would not block them in the robots.txt file, as that could result in Google not seeing the 404 and not removing it from the index (though they will cease to show the meta description).