Ecommerce SEO; The biggest problem.
We work on a lot of ecommerce sites SEO. By far the biggest issue we see are 404 errors.
404 errors are bad for SEO
If Google comes to your site and finds a lot of missing pages, which is what 404 erros are, it essentially sees a faulty site. If all your competitors have faulty sites as well that may not be a big deal as it puts you on a level playing field. If Google can send it’s users to a site for the same search that is not faulty though, it will. The more competitive the keywords you are targeting the more important it is that your site is free of errors.
Discontinued Products
The main reason that ecommerce sites have 404 errors is because they discontinue products and delete the page. This means that a page that was once there has now gone. Google may have known of it previously because it had crawled it before or it found a link to it somewhere. Having a few of these errors is not necessarily a big deal. If you are changing your product lineup regularly though and ignoring Google you do so at your peril.
What would you do in a real shop?
A few weeks ago Google released its SEO Cheat sheet. One of the things it suggested is that you should treat your online shop as you would an offline one. Specifically keep updating it to keep customers interested in coming back. I would extrapolate on this idea and suggest giving customers information on discontinued products.
Ways to help SEO & your customers
Permanently redirect the page to a new equivalent one after you have deleted.
Put a notice on the page that the product has been discontinued with a link to the new equivalent page and add a canonical tag if the old product was simple variation.
Watch this week’s video for some other ideas and a report that will tell you what is making you money and what is not.
Got an ecommerce site? How do you handle old products?
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
