Can Out of Stock Products Positively Impact SEO?

[Awarn]

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4726139.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 10:14 am on Jan 29, 2015 (utc -5)

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I have a question and wonder is others have seen this situation. I have a lot of products roughly 10K. I have two main competitors. They both have many products but I would estimate 20% or more are out of stock. In fact many have been out of stock for well over a year. On the out of stock items the prices are well below the current market prices. I have always wondered why you just don't delete these. But now I question if this may not be helping them. I suspect that these items get traffic because they appear so cheap. Traffic would be viewed by Google as popular. So in effect the lack of updating their site could benefit them. Any thoughts? Both sites appear higher in the SERPS.

[netmeg]

Most people can't get away with what Amazon gets away with (even without Google Directors).

[Robert Charlton]

It's worth mentioning that Amazon is big enough that it doesn't worry about selling excess traffic to other vendors... and that this works well for Amazon when products it sells directly are out of stock. Amazon offers both new and used products from other suppliers... and its rating and review system sort of works.

This is another one of those things which Amazon can do that many others can't. To respond to the OP's question, I'm sure that keeping customers on the site in this way positively impacts SEO.

[Planet13]

maybe in your meta description you can write "in stock and ready to ship widget xyz" it might improve click-through rates.

[Dymero]

Not deindexed. Downranked a bit, though.

You're right. But that wouldn't work in this niche. When a product is out of stock, it's out of stock for everybody. If all pages were to be downranked, it'd take some time before they were to be re-ranked. I've actually seen this happen with one product, and now that SERP is a complete mess. That's an exception, though.

The whole niche is probably an outlier, though.

[blend27]

One page could rank for several terms. Some terms might not be related or related in a similar matter but not 100% to the fact that the item is out of stock.

Lets say You are looking for 1985 Ford F-150 Engine Block and I had one in stock a month ago. It is now sold out, but the page has information on how to replace the Engine Block, step by step instructions including a video on how 2 and links related parts/tools that might be needed to complete the Job.

Plus, the page has 150 back-links from other sites mentioning several search terms that are related to Ford, F-150, Engine Block, etc... So Out of my control at the moment.

Would you want this page to Rank in SERP, even if the Block is out of stock? Or would you want scraped content(yes it has been scraped already, just the day before the sale) to rank and loose traffic to someone else? or Would this be considered deceptive?

p.s. adding +instock to search term when searching usually does the trick for me.

[netmeg]

If I were a user, yea I'd probably consider it deceptive. If I'm looking to buy something, I want a page that sells me something. If I want to learn how to install something, I'll search for how to install it.

[EditorialGuy]

I ordered something the other day from an e-commerce site that showed the item as being in stock. As matters turned out, the e-commerce site was just a drop-shipper, and the item wasn't in stock with either the merchant or the manufacturer.

Based on this experience, it would seem to me that, if Google were to use "in stock" as a ranking factor, it would be simply be giving a boost to dishonest vendors who claim that products are in stock when they aren't, and honest vendors would be at a disadvantage.

[netmeg]

Not to mention, there's in stock and there's in stock. One of my clients sells a lot of personalized and custom imprinted items - sure the items are in stock, but because they have to be worked on, they're not going to ship for 1-3 weeks, pending on how long it takes the customers to get their artwork in.