Early Results: Online Sales Outperforms Offline

Glenn — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:02:59 +0000

The holiday season was a disaster for lots of retailers, but the glimmer of good news is that online retail held up quite well: it is a low cost platform! Take a look at this post from SEOBook for more on this.

What to do About Old Product Detail Pages (301′s!)

Glenn — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:57:38 +0000

For businesses doing ecommerce in a retail environment (especially B to C), changing product continuously creates a problem for search engines and for the business website’s users. If the site was successful in ranking for a detailed product (classic long tail phrases), those results will continue to draw traffic even after the product is withdrawn. Result: 404 errors.

Solution A: 301 permanent redirects. This post in Get Elastic blog takes on the issue of “leaking” link juice due to expired pages. A good solution is to redirect those expired links to a live page that closely matches the intent or content of the old one.

Solution B: Where 301′s are not possible (why?) or you’ve missed a page, your 404 page needs to be helpful to the visitor. I’ve written about Get Elastic’s take on 404 errors elsewhere, but here what you want is a page that helps the visitor find what they were looking for as closely as possible

Search and Deploy » ecommerce

Early Results: Online Sales Outperforms Offline

What to do About Old Product Detail Pages (301′s!)