We've been optimizing a large e-Commerce auctions website for the past few months. The site may serially open and close multiple auctions for the same product - there aren't 2 auctions running in parallel for the same product. Until recently, closed auction pages were automatically removed from the site. Lately, they have decided to keep closed auction pages active while notifying users that the specific auction is closed. These closed auction pages are still being crawled and are returned in Google SERPs, sometimes above the live auction pages of the same products.
We've been contemplating some options on how to deal with closed auction pages, but are not sure which one to implement:
301 redirect from closed auction pages to the relevant sub-category page of each product in question. Does having a large number of 301s bad for the site's ranking?
Keeping closed auction pages alive and popping up a JS widget telling the users the auction is closed and providing them with recommendations for relevant auctions on the site, preferably to a live auction of a similar product.
Does anyone have any experience specifically with auction sites and how to behave with deprecated auction pages? All of information found on the web was inconclusive and not specific to the case at hand (auction e-Commerce websites).
Thanks in advance,
Nate
I'm not a SEO expert, so you should challenge everything I will say on that matter, but I will try to help you.
1) If you need to do that, 301 is the SEO friendly way to do it.
301 is also known as permanent redirect and should be used if the change you want to make is permanent. The stats of the old page will be transfered to the new destination page.
So, on the big picture and to answer your question, a lot of 301 will not probably hurt your SEO.
But... you're redirecting the user to a different content and be aware that you are transferring the stats from Product page to another page that is a page with recommendations.
You can read more about it on http://seo-hacker.com/301-302-redirect-affect-seo/
Another important point is that a lot of redirects can hurt your scalability, because you are increasing the load on your web servers.
2) As an user perspective I would prefer to keep the closed auction page alive and just show me some information saying the auction was closed (ebay does this).
You may also show some recommendations for relevant auctions on the site, but you should be very careful with the recommendations, if they are useless you may end angering the users.
Related
Why suddenly Google stopped indexing my posts? I started posting regularly in October. And the site got Adsense approval. I just changed the categories and front design. Some posts were in the top results but they lost ranks too. Domain age 2 yrs.
All of my posts got indexed after I submitted request. But after changing the category structure new posts are not indexing. But when I run live test search console says, "the post is ready to index" and no error sign shows up.
If it’s for the category change then how can I fix that?
I repeatedly submitted imdexing requests after running the live url test. I also submitted a new site map on the search console. But no luck. Google indexed no new post.
I've gotten a message that my site may be knocked off of Google Merchant Center due to "Inaccurate availability (due to inconsistent availability between the landing page and checkout pages on your website)".
This affects only a small amount of products (only around 0.3% of my 40,000-ish products), so I know it's not an engine issue. After asking Google to recheck the results, they came back with the same error, but with a completely different list of products with no overlap, so I know it's not a problem on the individual product level.
There's no geo-locking on these products, and Google says that the problem exists on US IPs.
Nearly all of the errors look like this:
Value on the landing page - v:out_of_stock
Value in the data feed - v:in_stock
Performing an audit on the products in question shows that none of them have been out of stock for weeks, so the data feed is correct.
None of Google's suggested common issues (geolocking, buy button not working, product can't be shipped to an address, products not available country-wide) seem to apply. The country Google checked this on was a US-based IP.
I'm running out of ideas here, does anyone have any other suggestions?
The answer turned out to be something silly for my site, but I'm posting the answer here just in case this helps someone else.
Google's crawler was setting their country to be Andorra and attempting to check out using the US site. This is obviously not a good representation of the US experience. Google advised us that this was a mistake on their crawler's part, and that we would pass the next audit without any modifications. So if you're here looking for a solution, the absolute best advice I can give you is to find a phone number for Google Merchant Center and give them a call because the error may not be on your end at all.
Update: We passed the audit with no changes made on our part.
Is there any way to gracefully remove visitors from a site rather than just putting the site into maintenance and booting everybody out? In particular I am thinking of an eCommerce site where there might be carts open, or even checkouts in progress, but I suppose this would apply to other sites.
Ideally I would envisage a system which would redirect new traffic to a maintenance page; but allow the site to "empty" over a period of time ... and have a monitor of number of visitors and whether they were active.
Does anything like this exist, or what is the industry standard workflow? I usually do maintenance in the middle of the night but that will only work to a certain degree, and not on an international site.
I had to do some maintenance on an eCommerce site yesterday and I used a sitewide notice ( which is available by default with many shopping cart systems; or could be easily achieved using some basic HTML/CSS if not ) .... I made it very prominent and put a clear start time for the maintenance on this notice ... also I started when I said I would.
In the absence of a more foolproof system this lo-fi approach seemed to work well – and maybe that's the best the industry can do at present. I'll leave this here as the answer unless someone comes up with something better.
I want to sell some products that are also prezent on another webshop. They are providing a datafeed with every information about the product, and they have nothing against that i post the info on my webshop.
The question is should i worry about duplicate content? The number of products is to high and it`s not worth rewriteing their description. Will google think that i stole the content?
Depends.
Personally i would prevent Google from indexing DC pages by adding this to the <head>...</head>:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/>
The URLs, which come into question, won't rank anyway. So it's (usually) Ok to keep them completely out of Google's sight and don't have to worry any more about all the Algorithm-Updates.
Or, if i have a lot of pages and need more Crawl-Budget, i would use the robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /path/to/affiliate/products/
In this case the Linkjuice cannot flow freely within my site anymore, but all the important pages get indexed. Plus it's incredibly easy to implement. (Just don't do this if you have a lot of deeplinks to your Products from your Homepage etc.)
Matt Cutts in 2009:
"Can product descriptions be considered duplicate content?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z07IfCtYbLw
He doesn't say "its bad" but he clearly shows that Google doesn't like it.
Matt Cutts in 2012:
"Is it useful to have a section of my site that re-posts articles from other sites?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7sfUDr3w8I States that it's propably a good idea to remove DC Pages (Like content from RSS-Feeds, Press Releases or Product-Description Feeds).
So to make a long story short - I really don't say "start panic" or whatever, i just say "remove everything from your site which could send out negative signals to Google, so you don't have to worry about it anymore" and then you can go on and build up your Brand to sell as many products as possible ;o)
Do worry about the content the site comes under the category of Affiliate sites so the product description would be same. it wont effect your site
If you want to do it properly I would get all the content re-writen. There is an amazing service out there too callws wordai.com.
Their site will re-write the content for you as if a human has on the Turing Plan.
You can then check the content with copyscape.com too see how unique it is!
Best of luck.
I have a client who over the years has managed to get their product to the top of Google for many different search terms. They're adamant that the new site shouldn't have a detrimental effect to their google ranking.
The site will be replacing the site that is on there current domain, as well as going up on to 5 further domains.
Will any of this lose the client there current ranking on google?
Google re-ranks the sites it has regularly. If the site changes, the ranking very well could... if more or fewer people link to it or if the terms on the site (the content) is different.
The effect might be good or bad, but uploading different content isn't going to make their rank go away overnight or anything like that.
Page Rank is most about incoming links. So if the incoming links won't be broken page rank will not be affected that much.
Though, overall ranking is not just Page Rank, so... further discussion is needed
if they retain current link structure they should be fine