Deleting Pages

[AndyBorrett]

Our supplier has brought out a new catalogue and a lot of the items we sell on our website www.metallious.co.uk are no longer available. We will also be adding new products from the new catalogue.

My question is what should I do with all the products that are no longer available. Our site is set up in SPP fashion so each page (including the title and filename) is optomised to that particular product.

1) If I just delete all the pages I am going to end up with lots of 'not found' errors although I could redirect each of the pages to something similar.

2) I could leave all the pages where they are but remove links to them from the site - probably not a good idea.

3) Reuse the filename but change everything else - not ideal for SEO.

What do people think would be the best way to go about this?

[leehack]

Have a custom 404 page in place and just delete the pages. Let the index update itself accordingly. New things get added, old things disappear, this is normal and expected behaviour, don't worry about it. The only argument i could make for keeping these pages, is if the products themselves have been superceded, whereby you could have the new product on that page or explain that it is no longer available, but this product is now in its place.

Whatever you do, do not send people down avenues that do not contain what they search for and do not get hung up on 301 redirects, when all that is happening is exactly what should be, i.e things not available, get deleted.

[Rich Brady]

I've had this discussion with a client only last month. He wanted to do just delete all the products that were listed as out of stock.

The problem is that they rank very well for a number of these items and the traffic driven to their site by these items is too good to loose.

As a compromise I created an "Out of Stock" image that prompted visitors to call them direct for news no when the item would be back in stock.

They've had several calls of already and sometimes they may have found the odd item laying around, or they made another sale off the back of it.

EDIT: It does depend on your product and whether or not it's likely to be back in stock. As Lee highlights, if there is an alternative/more recent product then move them in that direction.

[grantglendinnin]

Here's a clever yet simple idea.

Create a custom fragment layout, which includes Best Sellers/New Products (if you have the correct version of Actinic, of course).

Create a brochure page within Actinic, use the KB article to allow you to hide this brochure page from the brochure page navigation menu. Call the page something like 404_not_found.html

Then apply the following rule in your .htaccess file on the server:

ErrorDocument 404 /acatalog/404_not_found.html

Thus, your 404 pages always show new content (after you generate the marketing lists, obviously) - and of course, you can add a fragment about the error itself.

[Rich Brady]

Yeah, sorry. I made a little edit.

[leehack]

I understand the idea Grant and it's an interesting one. My only concern would be that a user has clicked to come view a product, if they don't see that when they arrive, i think the last thing they will want is other products shoved in their face. As you have no idea what they went for, these products could be a long way away from what they want and therefore useless/annoying.

I think i would err on the side of navigation, i think that's your best chance to keep them on site. So i'd favour going to the shop top page, with a slight difference to the normal one, in that it has the oops message etc at the top.

[animal dreams]

I always direct 404s to the sitemap. Adding best sellers could be interesting.

[pinbrook]

Grants idea is very interesting but as a shopper i'd prefer to be taken to the old page where it tells me the product is no longer stocked but here is a link to its succesor or altenatives. anything else is abit like the experience we all get when clicking ebay results in serps - ie we all fall down a big hole

[grantglendinnin]

Perhaps Gabe could come along and develop some ridiculously dynamic code to show related products to the deleted products. Now that would be cool, but if and how it can be done with Actinic is another matter.

[Rich Brady]

Perhaps Gabe could come along and develop some ridiculously dynamic code to show related products to the deleted products. Now that would be cool, but if and how it can be done with Actinic is another matter.

You don't have to delete them though... Remove the buy button and use the existing related product system within actinic.

If you wanted to you could use a block to change the "related product" text, to "This item is no longer available but take a look at these...."

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

I leave the product in place, remove the buy button and change the stock status to show as discontinued, leaving the related products underneath.
I also ensure that the product connot be reached from the navigation menu, so only reached from external pages linking in.

The bounce rate is around 80%, so around 1 in 5 customers stay and have a quick look around.

[AndyBorrett]

Thanks for all the replies.

I already have a custom 404 fragment set up but there is nothing apart from the Oops message and the main site navigation - I quite like the idea of using the marketing lists on there too.

I also like the idea of using related products in a 'have you seen these instead' way.

I am in the process of seeing just how many products will no longer be available so I will decide which way to go.

Many thanks again for all the input.