Google has a new “Webmaster Help” video out, which many ecommerce
businesses may find useful. Head of webspam Matt Cutts discusses what to
do on your product pages for products that are no longer available.
http://www.webpronews.com/what-you-should-do-for-google-on-product-pages-for-products-that-are-no-longer-available-2014-03
He runs down a few different types of cases.
He begins, “It does matter based on how many products you have and
really what the throughput of those products is, how long they last, how
long they’re active before they become inactive. So let’s talk about
like three examples. On one example, suppose you’re a handmade furniture
manufacturer – like each piece you make you handcraft, it’s a lot of
work – so you only have, ten, fifteen, twenty pages of different couches
and tables, and those sorts of shelves that you make. In the middle,
you might have a lot more product pages, and then all the way on the
end, suppose you’re craigslist, right? So you have millions and millions
of pages, and on any given day, a lot of those pages become inactive
because they’re no longer, you know, as relevant or because the listing
has expired. So on the one side, when you have a very small number of
pages (a small number of products), it probably is worth, not just doing
a true 404, and saying, you know, this page is gone forever, but sort
of saying, ‘Okay, if you are interested in this, you know, cherry wood
shelf, well maybe you’d be interested in this mahogany wood shelf that I
have instead,’ and sort of showing related products. And that’s a
perfectly viable strategy. It’s a great idea whenever something is sort
of a lot of work, you know, whenever you’re putting a lot of effort into
those individual product pages.”
“Then suppose you’ve got your average e-commerce site. You’ve got
much more than ten pages or twenty pages,” Cutts continues. “You’ve got
hundreds or thousands of pages. For those sorts of situations, I would
probably think about just going ahead and doing a 404 because those
products have gone away. That product is not available anymore, and you
don’t want to be known as the product site that whenever you visit it,
it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you can’t buy this anymore.’ Because users get just
as angry getting an out-of-stock message as they do “no results found’
when they think that they’re going to find reviews. Now if it’s going to
come back in stock then you can make clear that it’s temporarily out of
stock, but if you really don’t have that product anymore, it’s kind of
frustrating to just land on that page, and see, ‘Yep, you can’t get it
here.’”
He goes on to discuss the Craigslist case a little more, noting that
Google has a metatag that sites can use called “unavailable_after”.
Here’s the original blog post where Google announced it in 2007, which discusses it more.
The tag basically tells Google that after a certain date, the page is
no longer relevant, so Google won’t show it in search results after
that.
About Chris Crum
Chris Crum has been a part of the
WebProNews team and the
iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003.
Resource:
http://www.webpronews.com/what-you-should-do-for-google-on-product-pages-for-products-that-are-no-longer-available-2014-03
