301 redirects: How Closely matched Should The Content Be?

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

One of my ecommerce sites has had a lot of the products either moved to a new site or just dropped altogether.

For the products that have been dropped, how different can the content be before it is better to do a 404 (or 410) instead of a 301 redirect.

for example, if I had an individual product like:

Carved Japanese Stone Widget

that has been dropped, should I 301 it to the main Widgets category (or the main Stone Widgets Category)

Or should I just 404 / 410 it?

Thanks in advance.

[Robert Charlton]

First, you should determine, if you can, whether the original pages had external inbound links or some record of traffic from bookmarks. I feel there's no point in redirecting them if they don't have external references. The content of the pages from the old site that you redirect essentially disappears, so it's not as if you'd be preserving any nav links with your redirects.

Product page urls without inbound links should be 404ed or 410ed. Nav links on pages which remain on the old site that point to pages moved to the new site should be physically changed, not redirected.

I would definitely, though, try to preserve link equity to the pages that had external inbounds by redirecting these urls. In some cases, it may be a judgement call regarding what the closest match is. I wouldn't waste good inbound links by 404ing pages that had them.

[Planet13]

Thank You Again, Robert.

[TheMadScientist]

An interesting / different idea I've tossed around about things along these lines since the recent comments from Mu about pages having history and it being better to noindex if content may be 'upgraded' rather than 404ing ... I wonder what would happen if someone were to take product pages and create them 'more generically' and dynamically noindex them when they did not have a product, but if they ever chose to carry the product or similar product they would already have a page there with history, ready to go.

The above page is a perfect example for a 'custom' product not found page, but not serving a 404 with it...

EG Carved Japanese Stone Widgets located at /carved-japanese-stone-widgets

If there is a product the information related to the product is served as a normal page ... If there is not a product, a noindex tag is served (the page still returns a 200) and a custom 'sorry, but we no longer carry these Carved Japanese Stone Widgets, but you can find: Carved Chinese Stone Widgets or Carved Hawaiian Stone Widgets or even visit our main Carved Stone Widget Page for our full current widget line'

You don't have to worry about taking the page down, serving a 404 or redirecting, losing the link weight, redirecting too many pages or even starting a new page if you carry a similar widget in the future ... Cool URIs Don't Change, but sometimes the products they list do?

[aakk9999]

Hmm.. if you are giving customer a message:

Sorry, but we no longer carry these Carved Japanese Stone Widgets, but you can find: Carved Chinese Stone Widgets or Carved Hawaiian Stone Widgets or even visit our main Carved Stone Widget Page for our full current widget line

Then why noindex the page? Just put this disclaimer to be clearly visible above/below the product, remove/disable link to shopping cart and let the page still rank for "Carved Japanese Stone Widgets" so maybe the customer will land there and proceed to buy a Chinese Stone Widget or whatever stone widget.

Of course, under the presumption that there is enough content on this page to make it valuable enough to rank even though you do not sell the product any more. The story may be different if it was a thin page that did not rank in the first place - noindex then may make sense.

[Robert Charlton]

Then why noindex the page?

My thoughts exactly. TheMadScientist has come up with perfect wording. Why not keep the page in the visible index and give it a shot at ranking?

If you take this approach, make those suggested products hyperlinks. It's important to provide navigation to several alternatives that are in the ballpark. You definitely want to make strong efforts to keep the potential customer on your site.

[Planet13]

My thoughts exactly. TheMadScientist has come up with perfect wording. Why not keep the page in the visible index and give it a shot at ranking?

Well, there are a couple of concerns:

Firstly, I have kind of a lot of out of stock / discontinued products. If I left them accessible through navigation (meaning, a link from the category page to the product page), then I think I would be listing about 70% out of stock products and only 30% would be in stock.

Also, my site doesn't have much link equity - my home page only has a PR of 4 and I don't have nearly the number of inbound links as my competitors do. I am concerned that by having links from my category pages to my out of stock product pages, I might spread page rank too thin.

Maybe I could be selective: only keep pages with inbound links (there are just a couple) or pages that rank high / get a lot of traffic.

Or I could orphan them (basically, have no links into them, and with only links out from those pages to the other areas of the site). In essence, they would just be "landing pages." But would google then consider them doorway pages?

[tedster]

Google will know their history. If they have backlinks and/or are ranking, then you are doing those visitor's a service. You didn't build them as doorway pages and that history is clear.

I've often segregated a chunk of pages to a separate navigation area called "legacy" or "historical reference." Just one link from the home page that points to a kind of sitemap page for all the retained old stuff. That way it isn't orphaned.

For me, the judgment call is always serving the visitor first and foremost. So 301 handling needs to make sense for the human being, above all.

[TheMadScientist]

Yep, exactly what tedster said...

Those are exactly the quality of pages I don't want to find in the results ... In fact, if I ran into a couple of pages like that from your site and had the Chrome blocker extension installed the site would get blocked and whether it would impact your overall rankings or not by being blocked, it would impact your potential customer count, because I'm not the type who would go through my blocked sites list and remove sites from it ... You'd lose any possible future sale to me from those pages being indexed.

Planet13, I'd probably pull the links and treat them like they were a 404, only rather than serving a 404 header and custom error page, I would serve a 200 Found and link them to related products like I was saying, but would not 'lose' or 'redirect' the pages. Basically, I'd treat them much like a 404 page without the 404 header.

[Planet13]

Thanks for the input.

Ok, if I understand correctly...

Tedster is saying put them in a separate "legacy" section with navigation links TO them (but only from the "legacy" section - no links from the current section).

TheMadScientist says to keep them but remove ALL links in to them, and treat them as sort of a "mini site map" that links out to closely related products.

Is that a correct summary of your two positions?

Thanks in advance.

[tedster]

Yes, that is what worked for me. YMMV - of course.

[aristotle]

But I wonder about sites that have an excessive number of redirects and/or noindex tags. Couldn't this be a negative indicator from Google's viewpoint?

[TheMadScientist]

Yes, that's probably what I would do in the situation. I may leave the pages linked within the sitemap system (probably, highly likely), but idk if I would link to them from the home page or any other 'prominent' page while they are out of use or not ... That's not something I've done.

I have some 'similar' situations, but have not worked with the exact situation we're talking about, so I can't say how the application of what I would do would actually work out, but I know what I have outlined would be my 'first theory' and I would give it a shot and adjust as necessary from there.

I'm not sure if tedster is saying to move the pages or only link to the current locations from within a legacy section, but I would definitely NOT move the pages personally. I would leave them right where they are, with exactly how you defined it: a mini-sitemap for closely related products.

[Planet13]

I'm not sure if tedster is saying to move the pages or only link to the current locations from within a legacy section, but I would definitely NOT move the pages personally.

Right. The URLs for those products would remain the same as they are now. Just no more links from the category page to that product page anymore.

I just worry with such little page rank for my site in general,whether there should be internal links to those pages from ANYWHERE on my site. (those particular product pages don't have any external inbound links from anywhere - so they don't really help add any Page Rank, as far as I know).

[TheMadScientist]

If they are linked externally they would still pass PR to the site without linking to them internally, and removing the links to them should help keep the PR on the rest of the site because you won't be sending it to 'dead' pages ... That's one of the reasons I would probably not link to them other than from a sitemap page and that might be 2 levels deep, so I might not even link to them from the main sitemap, but rather essentially 'orphan' them and then link them back in when they have a product added again, and reason number 2 I might remove the links is freshness cascades from links, so I wouldn't want a stale link to them, because I could put a fresh one up later ... Unless I tried it the way I'm thinking and it didn't work that is. ;)

[Robert Charlton]

Maybe I could be selective: only keep pages with inbound links (there are just a couple) or pages that rank high / get a lot of traffic.

Yes, this is essentially what I was suggesting. I'd get rid of the rest of the discontinued product pages and keep only those with a connection to the outside web via links or bookmarks. So, we're not talking about keeping very many of those old pages. Because of that, though, I don't see how you can keep the old product pages in their current context, since that context will be gone.

Whether you 301 the pages just for linking credit, or keep them in something resembling their current form would, I'd think, depend on the appropriateness of the old pages to the new context of pages in your "edited" site.... ie, to how well they fit in with your new products.

If you do have the context of some closely related products, keeping the old page as it was and adding outbound links to make it a mini-hub for related products, makes sense. Assuming you keep the pages more or less intact, they should be kept essentially at the same depth from home that they're at now, and incorporated into your nav structure as appropriate. Since these pages have link equity to distribute up and down in your nav structure, they will provide a net boost to your current link equity.

I continue to feel that it makes sense for these pages to rank if possible. As a consumer, I've run into enough supply chain issues over the years that locating products I'm looking for is not always easy, and I value those ecommerce sites that refer me to appropriate related products or to other vendors. Depends on how really helpful your product suggestions are, of course, why you no longer have the products, how scarce the products otherwise are, etc.

If you'd be straining just to find a target for redirecting your anchor text equity, a 301 to a general category page may be the most helpful you can be. Put yourself in the shoes of a visitor following that inbound link to see if redirecting it makes sense.

Again, I don't see you hanging on to a mass of old pages. The idea of a legacy mini-sitemap for the overall site makes sense if you have a lot of legacy product pages with inbound links, which it doesn't sound like you do. Under circumstances as I understand them, linking to a legacy sitemap from home would be giving it too much importance, but lower down in the site hierarchy might not be.

[Planet13]

Thank You, Robert!

Great food for thought... as always.