How to handle expired product listings on your website
One of the biggest issues facing e-commerce sites & classified sites is something we call “product churn”. Every time a product or advert is deleted from the database it leaves a blank page causing problems for users and search engines.
Most platforms handle this issue pretty badly, the “solutions” range from blank pages, 404 pages, product not found pages that return 200 status OK headers and many more. My solution has been the same for years and it works very well to keep search traffic and make your users happy.
The first thing you need to make sure is that your expired product stays in the database, deleting products means deleting pages and that won’t help your Google traffic. Ideally you need to keep your listings live and in the Google index.
The key is to keep your page title, subject and content the same and simply add a note saying “This product is no longer available, below are some similar ones”. Make sure you don’t put the product name next to the words “no longer available” otherwise this phrase might show up in the search snippet and lower your CTR.
Once you have the page created you can add a section for related products by querying your database for the name of the expired item. Make sure you have some solution in the event you have no other matching items such as links to the top selling products in a category or even deals pulled from eBay.
Anther good tweak is to have a search box pre-populated with whatever query the user had entered into the search engine they used to find your site. That way they can easily search your site for the exact product they wanted in the first place.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Excellent advice, Patrick. That is actually what I have always done for my products on my eCommerce site. It seems to work pretty well.
Shana
Another tip is to dynamically insert a meta noindex tag when an expired product is being displayed.
I never recommend this, you want your expired listings to still get Google traffic.
Great advice. It seems odd that no one has thought about this and before it has become such a widespread issue.
Cool idea there, i especially like the “This product is no longer available, below are some similar onesâ€. Great stuff!
Good points, Patrick. I agree, the main idea is to satisfy the visitor. Keep them engaged and show them that you have more to offer than the 1 expired product.
Good idea. so the probable solutions for the expired product page may be :
a. keep all these expired product in the database, and give Search engine a 200 http status code.
b. provide 404 or 410 for these expired product page
c. 301 or 302 redirect these page to a more useful page.
my quesetion for first item(a) is
how long will these expired product page be kept in database? and if the amout of expired page keep on increasing in the further time , whether it will be treated as a spammer for search engine side?