Out of Stock message appearing in Google search result

[John Ennals]

Hi all,

I'm using RTS with SD 8.1.2, with "SOLD" as my OutOfStock message. This sometimes produces a confusing organic search result in Google, like this:


Although the item is in stock, Google is also picking up and displaying SOLD, although this is not visible on the website page: https://www.tortoys.co.uk/acatalog/D...uck-38602.html

Does anybody know whether it is possible to prevent search engine crawlers picking up the OutOfStock message?

Thank you,
John

[EdHarrison]

John do you have the meta description fields filled?

[John Ennals]

Hi Ed,

Yes, all relevant meta description fields on product pages are filled. I find that Google often uses them, but equally often Google decides to do its own thing and compile a search result from other stuff it finds on the page - that's when the problem occurs.

John

[EdHarrison]

Yes just what I was going to say, randomly Google seems to draw whit it thinks is relevant, lots of my painstaking meta descriptions are ignored to!

[brucet]

Hi John

We implemented a design fix for a similar issue in v18.0.4, ref. SD-7531. I can see that your site is using v18.1.2, so you should have that fix. But if you have any customisations in that area of the design, or you chose not to upgrade your layouts during the relevant upgrade, then it might have been missed. It would be worth contacting Support and asking if they can check.

On the other hand Google will do whatever it wants with whatever information it finds on the page, so it might be something else that's outside our control.

[John Ennals]

Hi Bruce,

Thank you for this pointer, I will follow it up. I have done some customisations, and it's also quite likely that I chose not to upgrade layouts when I upgraded from 18.0.3 to 18.0.4.

I think I'll also change my out of stock message to lower case, so at least it will be less prominent in search results if Google still picks it up.

John

[John Ennals]

For anyone who's interested, I've fixed this issue (I hope) simply by getting rid of the OutOfStock message altogether and using an image instead.

Specifically, I've set the OutOfStock message in Design|Text to blank, and created a new version of out-stock.png that is an image of the word "SOLD". I had to add padding-left to the data-message in the Display Stock Quantities layout, as the new out-stock.png was a bit wider than the original.

John