One SEO Professional was concerned about product availability issues on their site, in connection with the supply chain shortages occurring.
They found that the supply chain shortages are causing longer out-of-stock periods, and they don’t want to continuously display an ‘out-of-stock’ message to their users, since it creates a negative user experience.
Instead, they considered potentially taking all the URLs offline so customers stop complaining about the number of out-of-stock items on the e-commerce site. But, this means URLs and SEO are both impacted negatively.
John explained that one option is updating the URL’s structured data in order to explain to the user that the out-of-stock situation is really temporary. They can keep the URL in the index and keep refreshing it regularly.
But if the pages eventually get noindexed, or they decide to remove the internal linking, when the state changes back, Googleshould pick that up quickly.
Google tries to understand state changes through things like sitemaps and internal links. This is especially true if a website adds a product back, then suddenly it has internal links again, this helps Google to pick this up again.
It’s possible to speed this process up a bit by being more deliberate with internal links.
John added that you could hedge your SEO together when it comes to product search. If you submit a Merchant Center feed, they can also show the products there in the product listing ads based on the feed.
Therefore, Google doesn’t have to recrawl the individual pages to recognize that the page says it’s back in stock. They can recognize in the feed that you submit that suddenly this product availability changes.
This happens at approximately the 33:39 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John 33:39
Let’s see, my client is having a rather unique issue that is relevant to the times. Ordinarily, I would recommend that if a product is out of season or out of stock, that they keep the URL live and put a note to the user as to when the product will be available. With supply chain shortages, this company is experiencing an inordinate amount of temporarily out-of-stock products and this creates a negative user experience. How do we balance the user experience with SEO? They want to take all the URLs offline so that customers stop complaining about the number of out-of-stock items on the e-commerce site. However, this means their URLs and SEO is impacted.
John 34:20
Yeah, I don’t know. I think this is always a bit challenging, specifically around out of stock and temporarily out of stock content. It is something where what works best for us is if we can keep the URL online for things that are really temporary, in the sense that if the URL remains indexable, and with structured data, you tell us it’s this product is currently not available, then we can at least kind of like keep this URL in our index and keep refreshing it regularly, to pick up that change in availability as quickly as possible.
However, if you decide to noindex these pages, or if you decide to just remove the internal linking to these pages, then when that state changes back, we should try to pick that up fairly quickly as well. And we try to understand these state changes through things like sitemaps and internal links. So especially if you add a product back, and then suddenly it has internal links again, that helps us to pick that up again. You can speed this up a little bit by being a bit deliberate with your internal linking.
So in particular, like I think one of the questions earlier, were, when things are linked from the homepage, we think that they’re a little bit more important. And we go off and try them out fairly quickly. If you add those products back, and if you add a link to your homepage, saying, “Oh, these things are now in stock again,” then we can take that and say, “Oh, this seems to be an important thing, we will double check these pages a bit quicker.” And we’ll see if they’re actually now in stock or not. So that’s kind of the direction I would go there.
I think also with regards to in stock and not in stock, especially when it comes to products, one thing you can also do is kind of hedge your SEO together with product search. So if you submit a merchant center feed, then we can also show those products within the, I don’t know what it’s called, the the product search sidebar thing, or product listing ads, I think it used to be called, I don’t know what the current name is, we can also show those products there.
And we can show them there based on the feed. So we don’t necessarily need to recrawl the individual pages to recognize “Oh, the page says it’s in stock,” we can just recognize in the feed that you submit to us like suddenly the availability changes, we can put that back in. So those are kind of the aspects there. On the one hand, if you want to remove it with a no index or just removing internal links, that’s fine. That’s up to you.
If you change it back, make sure to make it so that we recognize those changes as quickly as possible. And ideally, also use the Merchant Center feed to kind of hedge your bets with regards to SEO so that it doesn’t depend purely on recrawling all of these pages.
