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We have a site that is effectively ‘out of season’ now and with limited stock left for this year we have decided that we want to ‘shut up shop’ for the winter, and offline concentrate on improving our web-site and back office functions ready to ‘open’ up again early next year.
We can of course stick up a splash page notifying our customers that the shop is now closed, but that means the 'deep page' inbound links (IBL) & search engine rankings we have secured will then link to non-existent pages.
We wouldn’t want to loose the brand, rankings or the effects of the IBL's.
IMO we have two options as below;
1. Best for SEO purposes - keep the site intact and display a prominent banner on each page telling visitors that the shop is closed for winter. This however will allow visitors to browse our shop & realise our poor stock levels thus degrading our brand.
2. Best for the visitor - Employ a 302 redirect (temporary redirect) from every page to a splash page (index page). This way our shop will remain closed to visitors but the IBL's to deep pages will remain intact.
It's a tricky one, ideally we would like to use the second option but will this really retain the effectiveness of the inbound links and maintain our search engine rankings (to a point!)?
Many thanks in advance.
This however will allow visitors to browse our shop & realise our poor stock levels thus degrading our brand.
Write a text which they can't miss on the page, telling them you have taken out everything, and that the site is being cleaned to serve them better next time. A little humour.
Sometimes, simple solutions like this might do better than any of the technical ways you implement.
Thanks again!
