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saki
VP-CART New User

82 Posts

Posted - May 21 2008 :  10:40:53  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
When a site has suceeded in getting good SE penetration down to the category list and product detail level, what do we do about deleted products and categories?

Links to specific missing categories and products are fine and at least we don't get page not found 404 issues just routed to a VPASP error page. Is there a way to map those errors to some other place so we don't start setting off duplicate content alarms in SEs? They really accumulate in SE and since they are always there there 200 OK with the error page there is no good way to get them out unless you want to manually go to each search engine and delete them. Excluding the error page in robots.txt is not good either...just generates an error in my google admin indicateing blocked link!

Any thoughts on this issue

Peter
VP-CART New User

125 Posts

Posted - May 21 2008 :  18:13:22  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
On our new site, we simply 'hide' the product so that any direct links to that page will still work, cut customers browsing and searching wont find it.

We have modified VPASP so that products with 'hide' set to 'yes' use a different template that removes the add to cart link (eg. it says 'sorry, this product is no longer available').

Can anyone see a problem with this approach?
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saki
VP-CART New User

82 Posts

Posted - May 21 2008 :  18:18:12  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
For the VPASP site that is one solution , yes. But it does not solve the build up of deleted products or deleted categories in the search engines. At least if it's just a templat change that will take care of the duplicate content problem.
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Steve2507
VP-CART Expert

590 Posts

Posted - May 22 2008 :  04:56:32  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
quote:
Originally posted by Peter

On our new site, we simply 'hide' the product so that any direct links to that page will still work, cut customers browsing and searching wont find it.

We have modified VPASP so that products with 'hide' set to 'yes' use a different template that removes the add to cart link (eg. it says 'sorry, this product is no longer available').

Can anyone see a problem with this approach?


Excellent idea, I've been looking for a solution to this for ages. The simplest are often the best.


Steve
Sex toys from a UK sex shop
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