Best SEO Practice for Removing Products

[koolrifz]

Hi All,

 

We sell many second hand musical instruments and do not use the inventory functionality in Prestashop. When I have sold an instrument, what is the best way to delete the item from my catalogue without getting a 404 error on the URL and images? As of my last Crawl I have 30 URLs Not Found that I want to fix.

 

I'm thinking it's the daunting task of:

 

opening the .htacess file and 301 each URL and image to the relevant category page

opening the robot.txt and Disallow each URL and image

 

Would you please comment on how you maintain your out of use URLs? Maybe there is already a discussion on this forum...but I can't find it.

 

Thanks,

Rob

[Ronaldo Perez]

Hi Rob

I asked a similar question, regularly "lost" pages - bad for Google.

I myself, I decided this question:

- Turn off the option "available for order"

- Did that when viewing the category and search for show only items available for order

 

We solve these two problems

- The buyer did not change

- To Google - nothing too changed, all pages on the site

[dtgmaze]

Hello,

 

Mij name is Dennis

 

I find this topic intresting because i am facing the same problem, but did not find any solution.

 

same problem here

 

Visit us on http://www.loveforrain.nl

[koolrifz]

Thanks for that Sebo. Love your stuff from Bali!

I was ignorant to the effects of deleted pages - thank you! I thought every discontinued web page needed to be registered in the .htaccess or robot.txt. I have a Joomla site with many many 404 errors which now I can track back to an out of date sitemap.xml that was registered with google.

 

Found this on the Webmasters Tools site:

 

"When a page is updated or removed, it will automatically fall out of our search results. You don’t need to do anything to make this happen."

https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164734

 

 

So in the end, just making sure the sitemap is up to date should be sufficient. Hope that's correct.

[abellasmith]

Hie... I am new to this forum.....I also suffering with same problem.. Thank you so much for helping me regarding this problem..

 

Regards

Abellasmith

[Mister Denial]

Hi folks,

 

as long as you have your 404 page correctly set up, Google will not penalize you for pages that are no longer available. They have officially stated that it is in the nature of the web that content comes and goes, so if you have a 404, you're good.

 

However, if you have incoming backlinks that point to that discontinued page, it is a shame to let those backlinks go to waste. You should then set up a 301 redirect in your htaccess file, or you can use the solution Sergey mentioned, and which we are using too, which is to not disable the whole product, only disable "available for purchase". We then move the product from the main category to a separate discontinued items category, so customers will not be distracted by items that are no longer available.

 

Hope that helps!

 

Dan