MALE SPEAKER: Today's question comes from San Francisco, California, Blind
Five Year Old asks, how would Google recommend handling e-commerce products that are no longer available?
Does this change as the numberof discontinued products outnumbers the number of active products?
Great question.
And it does matter based on how many products you have and really what the throughput of those products is, how long they last, how their active before they become inactive.
So let's talk about three examples.
On one example, suppose you are a handmade furniture manufacturer, like each piece you make you handcraft, it's a lot of work, and so you only have about 10, 15, 20 pages for the different couches and tables and all those sorts of shelves that you make.
In the middle, you might have a lot more product pages and then nall the way on the end, suppose you're Craigslist, right?
So you have millions and millions of pages, and on any given day a lot of those pages become inactive because they're no longer as relevant or because the listing has expired.
So on the one side, when you have a very small number of pages and a small number of products, it probably is worth, not just doing a true 404, and saying, OK, this
page is gone forever.
But sort of saying,
OK, if you're interested in this cherry wood shelf, well, maybe you'd be interested in this mahogany wood shelf that I have instead and sort of showing related products.
And that's a perfectly viable s
It's a great idea whenever something is sort of a lot of work, whenever you're putting a lot of effort into thosindividual product pages.
Then suppose you got your average e-commerce site.
You've got much more than 10 pages or 20 pages.
You've got hundreds or thousands of pages.
For those sorts of situations, I would probably think about just going ahead and doing a 404, because those products have gone away, that product is not available anymore.
And you don't want to be known as the product sitethat whenever you visit it, it's like, oh, yeah, you can't buy this anymore.
Because users get just as angry getting an out of stock message as they do no results found, when they think they're going to find reviews.
Now, if it's going to come back in stock, then you could make clear that it's temporarily out of stock.
But if you really don't have that product anymore, it's kind of frustrating just landing on that page and see, yep, you can't get it here.
Now, let's talk a little bit about the Craigslist case.
We do have a meta tag that you can use called unavailable after that basically says, OK, on such and such a date, this page is no longer relevant, and so
I'd like Google to not show it in the search results.
And so that's something where you can put a deadline and you can say, after this date it's not useful to show, therefore just let it automatically expire.
So basically those areas along the spectrum are where I'd ask yourself where is your particular website.
If it's a lot of work tomake each product or page, yeah, then somebody who lands on that page, who has a lot of conversion value, put some effort into trying to showthem related products or something else interesting.
If you've got a ton of products and you're not putting a lot of work into individual pages,
I'd just make them 404 if they're truly gone and out of stock.
Whereas, if you've got a huge number of pages,
I would go ahead and take the extra step of using something like unavailable after so thatthose pages don't crowd up the search results with expired listings that are just going to annoy users.
Hope that helps.