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-   -   Major category and product update (https://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?t=75455)

parmar 06-22-2017 02:31 AM

Major category and product update
 
Our store has been running for over a decade and in this time we have huge numbers of redundant products, and categories. We are in major overhaul of our site and reorganise our categories. So, I have few questions..

First, baring in mind we started our accessory store in days of Blackberry and in days of iPaq and when smartphones were called PDAs. We have fair amount of products we need to get rid of, we're thinking it could be up to around 60% of listed SKU from our store, how is this going to effect us? We are planning to use Smackdigital's Custom Redirect to redirect these deleted products to home page, or universal range.

Second, We need to simplify our root categories to redirect customers to specific type of products. These root categories are more relevant to what people search for. Is this going to help us, or hinder us when it comes to Mr Google?

Any help or suggestions would be highly appreciated, and thank you in advance.

cflsystems 06-22-2017 05:13 AM

Re: Major category and product update
 
If you have products which are no longer available for any reason you can:
1. leave them on site but remove purchase option - so they stay as catalog only mode an you will not lose indexing or being penalized for missing pages
2. Redirect to another page which is in some way relevant to the page in question. I think redirecting to home page for hundreds of links is not a good idea. If the link shows when people search for something and then you redirect to home page it changes user experience and changes what they were looking for. Google doesn't like this.
3. If above is not possible you can do 410 redirect which tells SE page is gone not just "not found". In this case it is more likely page was deleted on purpose and not coming back. Google will delete the index for the page faster as it will not try to re-crawl again, as with 404.

parmar 06-22-2017 05:32 AM

Re: Major category and product update
 
Steve,

Thank you, with regards to point 1, we are thinking of changing quantity to "0", thus it is still indexing. I think that will be a good way to start.

Thank you for your help.

cflsystems 06-22-2017 06:03 AM

Re: Major category and product update
 
Changing quantity to 0 still implies the product may be purchased at a later date. If leaving the products I would market them as :hidden but available for sale" in admin and use an if statement to remove the quantity and add to cart block - replace it with "DISCONTINUED" block or something like this.
Additionally if you are using structured data for products set "availability" property for these products to "discontinued".
And make sure you do not export them with any feeds and sitemaps as well.


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