Today’s post is question from Hicham Damahi of beezid.com/ who asks “How to handle expired product pages on a classified / auction site.” I’m going to expand the topic to cover expired product pages as well, since the concept it basically the same.

I touched on this briefly in my Shopping Cart SEO Tips post, but there are a couple of different conditions that require some finesse so let’s run through the most common cases:

Product Goes Temporarily Out of Stock: If a product goes out of stock temporarily, but you do expect to get it back in stock,  you’ll want to leave the page up from a search engine perspective. You want to make sure that you let the customer know the product is out of stock. If they can order it or be notified when it comes back in, that’s great. But taking the page up and down–that’s bad mojo right there. Don’t do it.

Product Goes Out Of Stock Forever: If the product goes out of stock forever, you have a couple choices. You can leave the page up with a discontinued notice on the page. IMHO that’s not the best way to go for search engines. Ideally I’d like to not lose any link equity and 301 the product page to a similar product, category/department page, or home page.

Product is Replaced or Updated: If a product is replaced or updated, handle it the same way you would handle a product that goes out of stock forever. Unless there is some value in maintaining an un-purchasable archive page, 301 it to the new product, up one category/department, or back to the home page.

Expired or Completed Auction Page: Handle this the same way as a product going out of stock or being replaced.

Why would you want to 301 the product/auction page instead of letting it expire and issuing a 404? Two key reasons: link reclamation and conservation of  existing link equity. Are all of your products/auctions going to get links? No, but some will. Links are like money: once you have them, you don’t wan to waste them or throw them away. You want to keep them. I wouldn’t advise trying any tricks with rel=canonical either. Search engines have said they will make their own decisions when it comes to  rel=canonical and IMHO the last thing you want to do is leave things to chance. Take the easy method that works and 301 the expired page.

If you are going to have a high volume of items that do this, you’ll want to work out an automated system to take care of as much of this as possible. Use product names, SKU’s ISBN, tags, or even product categories if you have to. Just don’t let them expire.

The danger of leaving up expired products/auctions is that you create a lot of useless pages. Your site only has a certain amount of inbound link equity, so don’t squander it on product pages with no value. Now if you sell unique collectibles and you want to keep the archives up, that makes sense, but if you’re selling consumer goods like an iPod or Samsung LCD TV, there’s just no point to it.

Lastly I’d like to bring up something called predictive SEO, which I wrote about in 2005. If you know that a product is coming, why not put up a page about it in advance? Don’t be a spammer and put up an empty page. Try to put something up that has some useful information: when is it supposed to be out, what are the specs, the price, etc. I also think it’s pretty smart to try and capture leads if you can as a way to lock in some future sales.

So, to wrap things up, here are the take aways:

• Put up and leave product pages up where you will be selling or restocking an item in the future.
• Capture leads for future sales on out of stock products wherever possible
• Redirect out of stock or discontinued products via 301 to replacement product pages or appropriate department pages
• Automate redirection as much as possible to cut down on maintenance

Advertisement: Find out how to get your bloggers talking about your products ViralConversations.com. #8

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How to Deal with Expired Product or Auction Pages

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Today’s post is question from Hicham Damahi of beezid.com/ who asks “How to handle expired product pages on a classified / auction site.” I’m going to expand the topic to cover expired product pages as well, since the concept it basically the same.

I touched on this briefly in my Shopping Cart SEO Tips post, but there are a couple of different conditions that require some finesse so let’s run through the most common cases:

Product Goes Temporarily Out of Stock: If a product goes out of stock temporarily, but you do expect to get it back in stock,  you’ll want to leave the page up from a search engine perspective. You want to make sure that you let the customer know the product is out of stock. If they can order it or be notified when it comes back in, that’s great. But taking the page up and down–that’s bad mojo right there. Don’t do it.

Product Goes Out Of Stock Forever: If the product goes out of stock forever, you have a couple choices. You can leave the page up with a discontinued notice on the page. IMHO that’s not the best way to go for search engines. Ideally I’d like to not lose any link equity and 301 the product page to a similar product, category/department page, or home page.

Product is Replaced or Updated: If a product is replaced or updated, handle it the same way you would handle a product that goes out of stock forever. Unless there is some value in maintaining an un-purchasable archive page, 301 it to the new product, up one category/department, or back to the home page.

Expired or Completed Auction Page: Handle this the same way as a product going out of stock or being replaced.

Why would you want to 301 the product/auction page instead of letting it expire and issuing a 404? Two key reasons: link reclamation and conservation of  existing link equity. Are all of your products/auctions going to get links? No, but some will. Links are like money: once you have them, you don’t wan to waste them or throw them away. You want to keep them. I wouldn’t advise trying any tricks with rel=canonical either. Search engines have said they will make their own decisions when it comes to  rel=canonical and IMHO the last thing you want to do is leave things to chance. Take the easy method that works and 301 the expired page.

If you are going to have a high volume of items that do this, you’ll want to work out an automated system to take care of as much of this as possible. Use product names, SKU’s ISBN, tags, or even product categories if you have to. Just don’t let them expire.

The danger of leaving up expired products/auctions is that you create a lot of useless pages. Your site only has a certain amount of inbound link equity, so don’t squander it on product pages with no value. Now if you sell unique collectibles and you want to keep the archives up, that makes sense, but if you’re selling consumer goods like an iPod or Samsung LCD TV, there’s just no point to it.

Lastly I’d like to bring up something called predictive SEO, which I wrote about in 2005. If you know that a product is coming, why not put up a page about it in advance? Don’t be a spammer and put up an empty page. Try to put something up that has some useful information: when is it supposed to be out, what are the specs, the price, etc. I also think it’s pretty smart to try and capture leads if you can as a way to lock in some future sales.

So, to wrap things up, here are the take aways:

• Put up and leave product pages up where you will be selling or restocking an item in the future.
• Capture leads for future sales on out of stock products wherever possible
• Redirect out of stock or discontinued products via 301 to replacement product pages or appropriate department pages
• Automate redirection as much as possible to cut down on maintenance

Advertisement: Find out how to get your bloggers talking about your products ViralConversations.com. #8

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How to Deal with Expired Product or Auction Pages

1. SEO for Product Reviews, Part I If you do any SEO work on branded or named...
2. SEO for Product Reviews, Part II In SEO for Product Reviews, Part I we talked about...
3. Product Blogs One of the types of blogs I like to use...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Last week at SES Chicago, we were sitting in some site review panels and came across an identical problem on two completely different sites: duplicate content on both secure and non secure pages.

Here’s a summary of how the problem occurs. Your shopping cart exists at https://example.com/cart/ Instead of building all of your links with absolute URL’s, you build them with relative links. Once a spider comes across a secure page with relative internal links, it will follow them. The problem is all of these links lead to secure pages, so search engines now have two versions of your website, and you have a potential internal duplicate content problem. While this isn’t a defcon 1 catastrophic failure issue, it’s an easy one to prevent and solve. Remember that everything you do to make your site easier for search engine spiders to understand will always work in your favor and that you never want to rely on band aid solutions to solve bad architecture problems.

• Use absolute URL’s if at all possible. Use a server side variable to build the domain so you can move files easily from development to production without worrying about creating issues.
• Use a server side programing solution to force pages to be secure/non secure. Don’t give someone the ability to checkout without being secure. By the same token, don’t let someone browse in secure mode.
• Use a “noindex/nofollow” meta tag on all of your cart/checkout pages.
• Use “disallow/noindex” directives in your robots.txt files. Sure it’s redundant if used with the meta tags, but it’s better to be safe than sorry in this case.
• Use the “nofollow” tag on the shopping cart/checkout link. You aren’t trying to sculpt page rank here but implement bot herding. Shopping cart, checkout, login, and admin pages are some of the few internal links where  I still recommend using this tag.

You might also want to check out a previous article I did with some Shopping Cart SEO Tips.

Advertisement: Track your keyword rankings over time with SEO Keyword Ranking

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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When you run an online e-commerce store with a shopping cart, it’s quite easy for your architecture and URL’s to enter into territory that’s not friendly for search engines. Here are some basic tips I recommend for everyone working with an online shopping cart.

Product Pages

Your product pages are the money pages in your site architecture. They are the ones you want to be in the absolute-most-search-engine-friendly format. Many shopping carts will place them in a category directory like this:

http://example.com/department-name/product-name/

However, I recommend a a different structure such as:

http://example.com/product/product-name/

http://example.com/prod/product-name/

http://example.com/p/product-name/

I don’t recommend using the department because most stores have a one to many relationship between products and departments. In layman’s terms, a product can be categorized in more than one department. For example, a set of plates could be in the “dinnerware,” “tableware,” or “entertaining” categories. It can also be in the “new,” “seasonal,” or “featured” category as well. When the merchandising side decides to change/add/remove departments, the URL is in jeopardy of changing, and that’s something to avoid at all costs.

Some stores are going completely flat and use no subdirectory. It’s a little risky: you have to watch for naming conflicts, and you lose a layer of control. But it’s not horrible.

I also recommend that you avoid using URL parameters at all on the product level pages. I prefer using 3-5 words for the product name, omitting stop words, and keeping the URL as short as possible. If your marketing or advertising divisions insist on using tracking parameters, write the info to a cookie and 301 to the proper page. Yes the new canonical meta tag will deal with a lot of it, but don’t ignore good site architechture because of laziness.

Unless you have a really good reason for using alpha/numeric ID instead of the product name, I’d always prefer the product name in the URL. Don’t stuff in extra words having the product name in the URL is almost always better than not. Just make sure it persists and doesn’t change if you go from a “blue widget” to a “cyan widget.” If you do change, handle the 301’s properly.

It doesn’t matter what file extension you use (.html, .jsp, .asp, etc) but I prefer to omit file types so you can change programming languages without remapping URL’s or needing to maintain legacy hacks in perpetuity. Rip off the band-aid once, get it over with, fix it right, and move on … ’nuff said.

Try to keep  HTML title and page header/titles similar unless you can work in variations. Keep your titles as unique as possible and make your product descriptions as unique as possible. Copy/pasting or importing and using a feed without any re-writing is a  bad idea. Reviews or other UGC are a great way to do that. Just don’t be a faker.

Always use a site map with links to your products. If you have a lot of products, use a dedicated HTML products-only sitemap(s). If you have at least 100 products I’d also go the XML sitemap route as well and ping all of the services.

When a product goes out of stock, keep the page up and display a message saying that it’s not available for purchase. The only exception is if you are never going to have the item again and there is no replacement. Serving a 404 is a bad idea. Going back and forth between a 404 when it’s out of stock and standard page when it is in stock is worse than a passive aggressive ex-girlfriend and should be avoided at all costs.

Department and Category Pages

Department and category pages in shopping carts are perhaps one of the biggest SEO obstacles in any ecommerce package. Probably the most important question you need to ask is whether there is any value to the department/category page? If there is no editorial content (text and picture) then there probably isn’t any need to have the page indexed. You just want the spiders to pass through on their way to the product pages, so use a noindex, follow meta tag and matching robots.txt setting and you are all set.

If you do want your department pages indexed, you need to be careful with filters and parameters. If you offer filters for sorting by price, size or any other attributes, you want to do it in a way that doesn’t append parameters onto the URL, this is actually where it makes sense to use javascript or ajax. If you have to use parameters, put in the rel=canonical tag and hope the engines get it right. If you have multi-page displays,  avoid adding parameters onto the URL; instead, use the # sign, ajax, or add a fake directory underneath like:

http://example.com/department-name/2/

You also want to be careful how you handle the “show all” if you offer that functionality. I’ve seen some experiments in which people feedithe search engines the “show all” version with the rel=canonical tag, but there are no solid answers about how well it works yet (be aware search engines have said they take that as a suggestion and reserve the right to override it). If your department pages do paginate you want the most important items on the top of the first page to ensure maximum crawlability.

I recommend having the title as one link to the product, the image as a second separate link, and the description as third and separate/optional link. I recommend breaking it to give the search engines a nudge to take the title. Use the title as the alt tag for the image (another nudge). I recommend linking all three just as a usability thing. You can test it with a service like crazyegg (disclosure: they are an advertiser, but I’d recommend them even if they weren’t). In every test I’ve seen they always click the pictures and almost always get some clicks on the text under the image. I also recommend putting the price under the image/description (again just for usability purposes).

To recap here are my shopping cart optimization 101 techniques:

• Keep things as simple for a search engine to understand as possible, especially in the URL.
• Keep as much extraneous information as possible out of the URL, writing the extra bits into a cookie if you absolutely need them and performing a 301 redirect.
• Keep URL’s short as possible by including only the keywords that are absolutely necessary.
• Give them the clues they are looking for about what information to attribute to the products through internal anchor text and links.
• Keep product titles and descriptions as unique as possible.
• Rewrite or add content if you need to make it unique.
• Only include department category pages if there is some editorial value.
• Use an HTML and XML sitemap to increase crawlability.

photo credit: iboy_daniel

Advertisement: Track your keyword rankings over time with SEO Keyword Ranking

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Shopping Cart SEO Tips

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