E-Commerce SEO: How to Handle Deleted Products

by Scott Allen - May 21, 2008
Filed Under E-Commerce, SEO

E-commerce solutions come in all shapes and sizes, from single “Buy Now” links from PayPal or Amazon to large e-commerce content management system (CMS) software. Their methods of handling search engine optimization can vary just as much. Some are already search engine friendly, but unfortunately some aren’t. There are a lot of SEO issues involved when optimizing an e-commerce system or CMS for maximum search engine rankings. I’m not going to tackle all of these in this post, but specifically how to handle deleted products in a way that will give you the best rankings, and maximize the traffic to your e-commerce website.

How Deleted Products Affect Your Site’s SEO
There are several reasons why it’s important to understand how deleting a product can affect your site’s search engine rankings. Let’s start by taking a look at the typical flow of adding and deleting products on an e-commerce website, as it relates to SEO.

Adding and Deleting Products: Steps in the Process

Product is added to product database and goes live on website.
Search engines find new product page, and if well optimized, start to rank it for relevant keyphrases.
E-commerce site starts to receive traffic from long-tail keyword searches.

Long-tail traffic often accounts for up to 70% of search engine traffic to a site, so it’s important to realize the importance and value of this traffic, even if it’s not for the site’s “main” keywords. Long-tail traffic also tends to have a much higher conversion rate because it is extremely targeted.
People start to link to specific product pages from websites, forums, etc. to recommend to friends and get feedback on whether they should buy.
Traffic increases from these new links.
Steps 3-5 repeat.
Site owner stops carrying product and removes it from website.

At this point, when someone tries to access the URL of the deleted product, one of three things usually happens:

The product page physically remains, but give some kind of message saying that the product is no longer available.

This is a problem for users because it just deletes the product and gives them no alternatives – it’s a dead end, and people leave when they hit dead ends. It’s bad for search engines because it serves a useless page which will eventually get de-indexed. Also, people who have linked to it will eventually delete their links to that page, so you lose some of your hard-won inbound links. (And we know every link counts.)
The product page disappears and turns up a “404 File Not Found” error message.

This is a problem for users as well because it again just deletes the product and gives them no alternatives – another dead end. It’s also bad for search engines because the page will quickly get de-indexed. With this method, you quickly lose any inbound link value because the links go to a 404 page.
The product page disappears, and redirects you to a relevant category or product page (via 301 redirect), and feeds the user or search engine back into the site.

This option is best for both users and search engines. It’s good for users, because it feeds them back into the site and gives them alternatives and other products to look at, increasing their chances of buying. If done properly, it’s good for search engines because it can redirect the inbound links to another page, capturing the value of all those inbound links and re-assigning it to the destination page, which improves it’s rankings.

You wouldn’t believe how many sites have it wrong. Be one of the ones that gets it right.

How Does Your Site Handle Deleted Products?
So, I have to ask, how does your current e-commerce system handle deleted products?

Do you even know? If not, it’s time to find out. If your site isn’t currently redirecting deleted product pages to a relevant category or product page, then you need to implement a fix, or you’ll be losing rankings, traffic, and sales.

The Solution
As I’ve mentioned above, the ideal solution for deleting products from an e-commerce site will involve using a 301 redirect from deleted product pages to another appropriate page. I’ll give some basic steps to take, without getting into the technical implementations here. These vary from system to system and may require you to do a little digging online if doing it yourself, talking to your web development team, or modifying your particular e-commerce CMS.

When the URL of your deleted page is requested, have it check the database to see if the product exists.
If it does exist, serve the product info.
If it does not exist, have the page do a 301 redirect to another page, preferably a higher category page, or relevant product listing page.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect that is search engine friendly. You can implement this on a page level in PHP, ASP and most server-side languages.

It’s very important that you specifically use a 301 redirect, and not a 302 (temporary) on any other kind of redirect (including JavaScript). Feel free to Google “301 redirects” for more info.
After implementing the solution, test it out and make sure everything functions properly from both user and search engine points of view.

That’s pretty much it. The concept isn’t complicated, but it will make a difference in rankings, traffic, and sales.

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