Product Documentation Causing 23-40K issues

[QAD_ERP]

One of my biggest hurdles at my company is our Product Documentation library, which houses thousands of pages of publicly accessible and indexed content on old and new versions of our product. Every time a product name changes the URL changes, causing a 404, so I typically have 100s of 404s every few months from this site. It's housed off our main domain. We have 23,000+ Duplicate Pages, 40,000 missing meta descriptions, and 38,000 due to this library. It is not built the same as our main content, with page titles and meta descriptions, so everything is defaulted and duplicate. I'm trying to make a case that this is an issue, especially as we migrate our site next year to a new CMS.

Does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with this issue in the short term and long term? Is it worth asking the owners of the section of content to develop page titles and meta descriptions on 40,000 pieces of content? They do not see the value of SEO and the issues this can cause.

It needs to be publicly accessible, but it's not highly ranked content. It's really for customers who want to know more about the product. But I worry it is hurting other parts of our site, with the absurd amount of duplicate content, meta, and page title issues.

[DragonSearch]

Hello!

Unfortunately it is difficult to give you a concrete answer without an understanding of your CMS and website structure. However, one thing did stand out to me. You mentioned above that you receive 100s of 404s every few months. Is there any reason why you are not implementing 301 redirects for these? When a 301 redirect is set up if a user where to try to navigate to a page that 404s they would be automatically redirected to another closely related page instead.

^Caitlin

[QAD_ERP]

Hi Caitlin,

Unfortunately, the site is structured in a way that anytime there is a change to a product version or name, a new path is created in our CMS (which is an old system called Vignette) and a new URL is created and the other is broken. Because there are 100s of these happening with each new product release, I get resistance from the web developers on my redirect requests. One reason being they'd have to do this manually each time, the other being site performance concerns. I had to really push to get the / vs non-trailing slash versions of the higher ranking pages on our site redirected and that wasn't nearly as many pages as this library.

I know my question is pretty broad. I'm just curious if someone out there has experienced similar issues and how they made the case that it needs to be fixed? Or if redirects is the only answer, will that many redirects negatively affect performance? Because we are moving to a new CMS where hopefully this won't be as big of an issue, is it best to take the hit now? As we migrate, all those links will eventually be broken. And trying to make the case to redirect 40,000 URLs might be even harder.

Because these are low-ranking pages, should I suggest removing this library from the website's root domain?

[webmethod]

Hi there,

As far as your platform goes, product name changes simply shouldn't be causing 404s and this can be (relatively) easily bypassed by introducing the product id to the end of the URL. The name can then change but the product id remains the identifier for the product to load on the page.

With regards to your 40K pages without meta titles or descriptions, it's going to be almost impossible to fix that manually. It sounds as though you need to establish a business case, which could be done by fixing a few hundred of them (based on the ones that get the most traffic) and seeing if it has any improvement. This might not have an impact though as it sounds as though they aren't doing well in SEO as it is, although I agree there's a chance that these poorly optimised pages might be hurting your overall rankings.

The challenge you face sounds like more political/strategic than technical though. Either SEO has actual/potential value to your business or it doesn't. If content producers aren't versed in SEO or focused on maintaining it or producing optimised pages and content then you probably have an uphill battle ahead of you to get them to focus on it.

Good luck,

George