Hi folks, I own a small ecommerce store and a couple of years ago I decided to remove all the products and categories from the store and replace them with new products and categories. I was getting too many orders/traffic to products that were discontinued, so it seemed the correct thing to do was to remove them and add new products. Many of the products on the store were still available, but they had long urls, so I decided to remove those as well and basically start again. I did expect to see a drop in sales/traffic while the new products were being indexed. But the traffic going to the store is no where near what it used to be now. So I've been trying to find out why by searching google, which is what brought me to this forum. When I look at Semrush, it shows a large and consistent drop in SE traffic from October 2010, im guessing this is when I removed the products. I've read on another forum you should not ever delete a page. But I've also read if you are finished with a page its best to delete it and set up a 404 response for it. Well I've deleted thousands of pages so im guessing it was a very bad move because I will loose all the backlinks for those page as well and that has seriously hurt my domain? So I checked in Google webmaster and it is reporting over 11,000 404's, some of these are internal links. I was thinking about going through each one of those links and creating a redirect to a page that is live on my store, but wanted to ask you guys if this is a good idea or not? I checked some of the backlinks and the pages are still live on the forums and those forums are completely relevant to my topic. Thanks in advance for any help!
To be brutally honest, you have basically screwed up the whole website. You should have just put a permanent redirect to old pages for all new pages. Now depending on your ecommerce, this should be easy since all products use one template. What you can do now is try restoring all the pages on the website which you deleted and put a permenant redirection. Hope this helps. Regards, Atiq
I read on google webmasters from matt cutts it is always best to delete the page rather than do a redirect, thats mainly why I deleted the pages. I'm assuming you are saying I have screwed up the whole website because I deleted all the pages yeah? I can restore the pages, but I dont think it will make a good experience for the user. Why would you restore an old page and redirect it to a new page as apposed to redirect to the new page without adding the old page? Anyone else want to chime in? Thanks in advance