Questions
-
Inventory Pages that are Sold, 404 vs 301?
I agree with Moosa, but would add another layer of analysis on this. You need to do a type of content audit on these pages. You can go into GA to just look at traffic or use a tool (my new favorite) called URL Profiler to pull GA and OSE and Majestic link data plus social media shares on your sold product URLs. For each sold product page you have two options: 301 the page - If the "sold' page generates a fair amount of traffic, and even has some links coming in, you probably want to 301 redirect it. The 301 needs to be to a page with similar semantic information. Ideally this would be a main product category page so you can build the traffic to that page. Example: If you sell Ford Mustangs and you have a lot of "sold" pages of Ford Mustangs, and those sold pages still get traffic and even have some links to them, you want to 301 those pages to your main category Ford Mustang page that has links to all of your Ford Mustangs that are still for sale. Good for Google, good for the user. Key point is that a) the "sold" pages are still generating value (traffic and links) and b) that you redirect to a semantically related page. If you use a 301 to redirect to the home page that is a bad idea as it needs to be closely related in topic. When looking at a "Ford Mustang for sale" page, a multiple car brands for sale page (your home page theme) is not as closely related to it as your main Ford Mustangs for sale category page. It would also behoove you to really make that Ford Mustang for sale category page really kick a$$ content wise. 410/404 the page - If you find a large group of "sold" pages that do not get very much traffic to them and/or they do not have much link equity, just let them 404/410. Show a helpful not found page with links to other sections of your site and even a search function. FYI - I like the 410 directive as it is a "permanently gone" directive vs a temporary one. How do you get the data I am talking about on all the "sold" pages? Using a tool like URL profiler, you put in all of your "sold" URLs and the software uses an API to get data from Search Console, GA, OSE and Majestic (among other tools) and pulls them into a single line per sheet. You can then look for each URL any of the data and determine if you use option #1 or option #2. Moz has an article on how to do a content audit you can search the web for other examples. A simpler version of this would be to use the advanced search within GA and pull the organic landing page traffic on those pages. Some SEOs would say that option #2 is blasphemy. ie. you always want to 301 redirect. Why would you ever want to lose traffic by setting up a 410? That will cause errors to show up in Search Console! You will lose link equity and traffic! This is why you have to perform the content audit. If you have 1,000 pages but 800 of them send next to no traffic to your site and have generated 2 links, you can 410 the 800 pages and never notice the difference. You will not miss the traffic or links as they had none to begin with! All those 800 pages are doing is wasting your crawl budget with Google and giving a signal to Google that you have a bunch of low quality pages on your website. Also, don't panic when you see all the 410 in Search Console. Just sort by date and then by priority to make sure that these are all the pages that you want to 410. Over time (about 3-4 months) they will naturally fall out.
On-Page / Site Optimization | | CleverPhD0