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Hi All,

I was wondering when I should write something as a post in my blog and when I should simply add an article in my articles section?

What are the advantages of each way?

Thanks

Thanks all, it makes lots of sense but it brings me to ask another question...

What do I put in the Blog and what do I put as an article in my articles section?

Dear Alan,

I thought that 404 means a missing page.

However, the pages are there simply no-one pointing to them (because the item is out of stock). This is why I thought to 301 them to a similar existing item or to the category page.

Also, it happens to me a lot since I am selling unique pieces (like art pieces) so each time a product is sold the page becomes irrelevant and it may happen even to 100 pages per week. What do you recommend?

Thanks

Hi,

I was wondering what is the best way to run a blog?

The options I thought of are:

1. Completely separate domain with many links to my main site.
2. blog.domain.com
3. www.domain.com/blog

Thanks

Dear Egol,

Whats the point in investing in the sold items gallery if you still redirect the pages - no one (not human nor Google) will be able to enter the pages...

Thanks

Hi,

I was looking at BlueNile (biggest diamonds online dealer in the world) since I was wondering how they dealt with similar products and with sold products.

Each diamond that is sold is unique. Once it is sold it is unavailable for sale.

Also, all diamonds are VERY similar so they should also find a way to handle duplication in content.

Look at the following 2 pages:

http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02360835

http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02366155

The pages are practically identical and in the "view source" I noticed that they add a canonical tag to themselves...

Any thoughts on that?

Thanks

Hi All,

What happens with an indexed page that I 301 redirect?
Is it removed from the Google index after a while?

Thanks

Hi,

I have an e-commerce website that sells unique items (one of a kind).

We have hundreds of items and the items are rapidly sold.

Up till now I kept the sold items under our "sold items" section but it started to get back at me as we have more "sold" than non sold and we are having duplication problems (the items are quite similar besides to sizes etc.).

What should we do? Should we redirect 100 pages each week? Will Google be upset with that? (for driving it crazy)

Thanks

Hi Mat,

I encountered myself the same issue and wondered what you thought...

I run an e-commerce website. There was a point where I saw a keyword that is somehow related to my site but I knew that it would have low percentage to convert.

I decided to try and added an article about it. It got me on first page for two keywords (positions 3 and 7) that are exact searched about 420,000 times (which is much more than all of my main subjects together...).

The article is very good and informative - I have 80% bounce and average time on page of over 2 minutes. Meaning people are coming, reading and then most of them are leaving. By the way, I have an outgoing link there to a more related site assuming that I rather have them going out through me than back to Google.

Is that a good thing or I should stay away from these type of articles?

Thanks. The site I was asking about  is written in aspx so there is no htaccess file.
Also I was asking specifically on the home page as it seems that the SEOMoz crawler states as if I have duplicate content on my homepage - because of the slash...
I knew to redirect domain.com to www.domain.com but didn't give any consideration to the "/".

Regardless (on the same matter), I have another site which is a wordpress site and now you got me wondering - where to should I link to in my articles:

www.example.com/content

www.example.com/content/

Because both would get the same page...

Highland,

This is what open site explorer shows.

It states that I have 2,005 external links to www.domain.com

and it shows that I have 7,164 total external links to www.domain.com/

It also refers to the second as a subdomain.

Hi,

I only now found out that www.domain.com and www.domain.com/ are different.

Most of my external links are directed to  www.domain.com/ 
Which I understand is considered the subdomain and not the domain.

Should I redirect? (and if so how?)
Should I post new links only to my domain?

Creating 301 to non-existing products is easy (technically speaking) - are you sure that it not considered a bad thing by Google? (pages keep being removed).

Thanks again

Dear Chas,

You are actually correct - Google often sends people to the sold items pages and while I assumed that they will look for a similar product - they actually bounce!  This is why I thought that if I will add a one way link from a sold Item to an available item Google will direct them to the available item.

About redirection - I can do that but it will be lots of redirections - products are rapidly changing.

Maybe I really should simply remove a product completely when it is sold (make it unreachable from the website - no links to it at all) and have a 301 on it and call it a day... What do you think?

see update on top. Thanks

see update on top. Thanks

Hello,

I'm selling unique products - only one of a kind of each product.
This means that whenever a product is sold, it is removed from display.

In order  not to upset Google by keep removing indexed pages I created a "sold items" page which links to all of the removed products.

The problem is (or maybe it's not a problem) is that I got to the point where I have more "sold items" then existing items (and the list keeps adding up).

What should I do with the non-existing items?
Was I correct?

---------------------------------------- ADDED INFO ---------

The way the site is built is that I have main category pages and each of them is showing a large amount of products. Most of these products got indexed by Google. Each product has its own unique URL (Products do not return...)

Once a product is sold it does not come up in the product categories - I only have a general "sold items" in the footer that shows all of them (with a lot of pagination).

Since the products are rapidly changing, i thought it would upset Google to have a hundred 301 redirects in each week or two.

Since the products are very similar to one another (only different measurements / colors etc.), I thought of having a link from a sold Item to a similar available item so if Google will direct someone it will probably be to the available product.

The problem is that the sold items are now 4 times more than the number of available items... I don't think that a store should display 2008's t-shirts on 2012...

Another problem that may rise with so many products is that I'm afraid that the one type of product that is being sold much more often will take charge at the end on the entire site since I will end up with 8,000 sold items of this product, 1000 sold items of other products and 1000 available misc products... this might also start causing duplication problems as the products are quite similar.

Should I stop with the "Sold" products and use 301's?

Thanks

Thanks for the reply but I am unable to create the 40% unique content.

My case is exactly like the BlueNile sample I gave on top...

These are extremely similar products but still each is unique because of slight differences (that are important to the buyers). I have thousands of products and each product is one of a kind - when it is sold - it is removed to the "sold items" section.

There is no way (and no point since each product can be sold once)  to write a description to so many products that are constantly changing.

Hello,

I have an eCommerce website with hundreds of similar products. On some occasions, besides for their measurements they are completely identical.

The titles are kept different by using the stock reference and the meta descriptions also use their measurements.

However, I'm gettingDuplicate Page Content errors by the MOZ crawler.

This is more than understandable since the products are very similar -
WHAT SHOULD I DO???

I noticed a similar situation in BlueNile (the diamond ecommerce site) - They have numerous almost identical pages, see example:

http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02424873

http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02430168

For some reason, they did on each page a canonical to it's self...

I wanted to add...

It is impossible to add different descriptive texts due to the amount of products and to the rapidness they are sold (each product is unique - similar to the diamonds in the BlueNile example).

Dear Egol,

I'm assuming by your answer that PDF's take link juice and JPG's don't (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Is that the case even if I have <a href="">to enlarge the image? (I use href with JQuery and not regular target=_blank)</a>

<a href="">Also, what to do about the certificates that are on other sites? (too many and rapidly changing for me to get it to my site)</a>