Hey there! Ready to geek out on some SEO magic? This episode of The SEO Show is all about the nuts and bolts of technical SEO for e-commerce. Michael and Arthur are back for week two of their e-commerce series, and they’re serving up some tasty insights to help you get your site in tip-top shape.
We kick things off with a classic cautionary tale from Arthur about an e-commerce client who learned the hard way that not all theme updates are created equal. Spoiler alert: Code bloat is a real party pooper for your search rankings! The lesson here? Always keep an eye on what’s happening behind the scenes of your website.
The episode then breaks down the essentials of technical SEO into five key themes: crawlability and indexability, site speed and performance, user experience and mobile optimisation, content structure, and finally, security and accessibility. Think of these as your SEO building blocks, helping you create a solid foundation for your site.
Michael and Arthur highlight the importance of making your site a breeze for Google's crawlers. That means having a neat XML sitemap, optimised images, and a streamlined codebase. And don’t forget about site speed—nobody likes waiting around for a slow page to load. They drop some jaw-dropping stats about how even a tiny delay can cost you big time in conversions. So yeah, speed matters!
For those of you with multi-language sites or seasonal products, they’ve got tips on using hreflang tags and managing 404s and redirects like a pro. The duo also teases some upcoming episodes focusing on content and link building, promising more SEO goodies on the way.
So, if you’re running an e-commerce site, take a peek at your setup with these themes in mind. And don’t worry, Michael and Arthur will be back to dig deeper into content and everyone’s favourite, link building. Until next time, happy SEO-ing!
[00:00:02] Introduction to the Podcast and Hosts
[00:00:23] Overview of Technical SEO for E-Commerce
[00:01:20] Case Study: Impact of Theme Updates on SEO
[00:05:34] Exploring Key Themes in Technical SEO
[00:06:33] Deep Dive into Crawlability and Indexability
[00:11:27] Site Speed and Performance Optimization
[00:14:56] User Experience and Mobile Optimization
[00:17:47] Content Structure and Optimization Strategies
[00:21:10] Security, Accessibility, and Managing Redirects
[00:25:17] Concluding Thoughts and Preview of Upcoming Episodes
[00:00:02] Intro & Outro: It's time for the SEO show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.
[00:00:23] Michael: Hello and welcome to the SEO show for week two of our E commerce series. Last week we set the scene. This week, my esteemed co host Arthur Fabric and I are going to be talking technical SEO. So if you think about last week as being setting the scene, your technical SEO is like, it's the foundations, it's the plumbing, it's the pipework, the wires for your build. The wires, yes. So technical SEO is a massive beast in and of itself. So this episode we're not going to be diagnosing and addressing every technical SEO issue with E commerce. We're going to talk about the big. The big key themes, the key buckets.
[00:01:02] Arthur: Maybe we can start by talking about why it's so important. With the story that I had to tell you from last week, the one I hyped up a lot, which I now thinking about, it isn't that exciting.
[00:01:12] Michael: But stand behind your hype, but I.
[00:01:15] Arthur: Think extremely relevant to this episode.
[00:01:17] Michael: Okay, well, it's story time with Arthur Fabric. Okay, take it away.
[00:01:20] Arthur: Well, we have, we have a client, a big E commerce client here in Australia and they. So basically the story starts with them making changes to the website. So they are based on a. They're based on Shopify and they were making tweaks to their theme, so they were updating their theme. And like most clients, they don't often keep us in the loop when they make changes like that. You know, sometimes, you know, when you're working on a big E commerce site, you can't just keep telling your SEO agency every time you make a change. I mean that it's impossible. But in this case, what they did was they updated the theme and also included specific plugins in that theme. So when they rolled it out, the site looked the same on face value because actual front end of the theme hadn't changed. But in the back end, what happened was there was a lot of code bloat added to the site. I'm talking about tens of thousands of extra lines of code. So what happened was they had a big sale coming up and one of the biggest days of the year for them, and they rolled out this new theme. And what happened was over time, rankings started to drop. So we were looking at it, we're thinking, okay, cool, maybe it's just fluctuations. There has been a lot of algorithm updates. Maybe it's Just normal or bounce back. But over time, rankings just continue to drop further and further.
[00:02:40] Michael: Not even drop. Plummet, really?
[00:02:42] Arthur: Was it plummet? Yeah. So it got to the stage where we were like, okay, well, have they been penalized? Like, you know, what's going on here? So we started looking into it. We looked into Search Console, and we started seeing some soft 404 errors coming up on some of the, you know, main pages, main category pages. And we had a look, and it was. Started getting de indexed. So we're looking at the page saying, what's going on? Like, how. How is this possible? The page hasn't changed. The content's the same. Everything. Everything's the same on the page.
[00:03:08] Michael: And to give you context, these category pages were ranking number one for, like, the juiciest.
[00:03:14] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:03:14] Michael: You could hope for in this space.
[00:03:16] Arthur: The main money pages. So them being the bread and butter right before the biggest sale of the year.
[00:03:21] Michael: Yeah, it's like five. Code five. Code five, whatever. You know what I'm trying to say?
[00:03:27] Arthur: Like, not really.
[00:03:27] Michael: DEFCON 5. Like, massive alarms going off. We got to fix it.
[00:03:31] Arthur: Yeah. So, okay, we saw the soft 404s, we started looking at the code, and we started comparing the code to a snapshot of the site from, you know, a couple of days ago before everything started going wrong. And we realized, okay, well, what's this? You know, why is there, you know, 40,000 extra lines of code? We're trying to, you know, wrap our heads around what's going on here. We're trying to figure out what. What has changed. We're looking at it, and, you know, the client. We. We brought this to the client's attention, and we asked them, have you, you know, have you made any changes? And they, you know, unknowingly said, no, we haven't really done anything. We told them, you know, your ranking's going backwards. This is what's happened, and this is what we found. And. And then it was a lot of back and forth, and eventually, after a little bit, we figured out, okay, so they've updated the theme, and we were like, okay, well, that could potentially be the reason as to why this has happened. Not potentially. Well, definitely the reason as to why this has happened. Fortunately enough, they had backups that they could quite easily revert back to, and within a couple of days, all their rankings skyrocketed back to where they were. It took a little.
[00:04:31] Michael: Skyrocketed? I hate that term, but okay.
[00:04:34] Arthur: No, it's. Well, it's true. Like, it was very, very quick for them. To get back to where they were. But, but you know, looking into it, investigating it, they installed a plugin and within that plugin there was just a lot of code bloat. Don't know how it happened because I'm not aware what the plugin is specifically, but it was a plugin that just inserted an insane amount of code. Google wasn't able to crawl the content on the page because all of that bloat.
[00:04:56] Michael: Yeah. Hence it gave up after reading all the code after a while.
[00:04:59] Arthur: So hence the soft 404. So the soft 404 occurred because Google just said, well, there's no content on this page. It's just a mess, so not important.
[00:05:07] Michael: Yeah, we'll stop indexing. Yeah, great example.
[00:05:10] Arthur: Well, that's a great example. And you know what? Someone wouldn't even notice it on face value. The page was exactly the same. And if, if you're not an SEO, if you're not a technical SEO, you don't realize that stuff on the back end can have a massive impact on everything.
[00:05:26] Michael: Well, I think that's a good story.
[00:05:27] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:05:28] Michael: I don't think you hyped it up too much.
[00:05:30] Arthur: Yeah. Well, it just shows the importance of, you know, having to be on top of your technical SEO.
[00:05:34] Michael: And that's what this episode is all about. We are going to talk a few key themes. So one of the things you mentioned there is code boat, code bloat.
[00:05:43] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:05:44] Michael: Which probably the themes we're going to talk about. Let's list them. So because there's so much stuff you can do from technical, we always like to bucket SEO into themes. You know, authority, content links, technical, like whatever in the technical world, our themes. Okay, let me know if you agree. Crawlability and indexability is a theme. Site speed, performance of the site is another theme. User experience and then mobile experience sort of bucketed together as a theme. And then your content optimization and structure of content and then finally like security of the website, accessibility. So that's five key themes really, that most of your technical issues that you're going to run into sit within.
[00:06:31] Arthur: Yep, I agree.
[00:06:33] Michael: So let's, let's chat about each theme. We'll give a few examples, maybe within them. As we said, we're not going to be addressing every technical problem that you could have with your site, but it's going to help you, I guess, think about the little, little buckets that you want to be thinking about when looking at your site. So let's chat. Crawlability and indexability. So I guess a good way to think about it like, unless you're really into SEO, maybe a little refresher on how Google works. It has crawlers or spiders.
[00:07:03] Arthur: I can see an analogy coming.
[00:07:04] Michael: Yep. These crawlers, they move. The web is like a book and it has tons. Or it's like, yeah, you said the.
[00:07:12] Arthur: Web is like a web.
[00:07:13] Michael: The web is like a book. It's got tons of pages in it. And it's Google's job to read all those pages and index them back in its library. This is the analogy we used in the past. So the crawlability and indexability pillar of technical SEO basically comes down to making sure that your site makes it easy for Google's crawler to move through it and find what it needs to find. Not waste time reading stuff that it shouldn't be reading. Not land on a page like in your example and have to read thousands, tens of thousands of lines of code and see nothing. And it's basically having all your ducks in a row when it comes to that. So some examples of stuff that you might be doing in this is straight off the bat. An XML sitemap set up. Linking to the pages that matter. Not having links to every product variation and color combination and stuff. Just the key pages in your XML sitemap so that Google can go read it and say, all right, these are the pages I need to index.
[00:08:07] Arthur: So what's an XML sitemap? For those who don't know, it's a.
[00:08:11] Michael: Sitemap that typically lives at your domain name.com sitemap so users don't see the sitemap.
[00:08:17] Arthur: It's like a. It's like a file in the backend that Google Chrome crawls before it crawls your site. With all the links and URLs that you want Google to visit.
[00:08:23] Michael: Correct?
[00:08:24] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:08:24] Michael: And it's dynamic. It will update as you add pages or remove pages to your site.
[00:08:28] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:08:29] Michael: It's a street directory.
[00:08:31] Arthur: You can prioritize the importance of specific pages and how frequently you want Google to crawl them.
[00:08:36] Michael: Correct. Another thing similar to that is robots file. You can use a robot. Robots Txt is like a nice little. It's like you're saying to Google, please don't check out this stuff. And then Google will decide whether it's honors it or not.
[00:08:48] Arthur: Yes.
[00:08:49] Michael: So again, using robots, you can try and say, don't go and look at these pages, these pages. Like you might have tag pages or something on your site that are relevant. Like you land on it and it's no content. And don't waste time looking at that stuff.
[00:09:03] Arthur: And that's very important for E commerce sites because there's often a lot of spam pages that get generated and Google will crawl and index those. Unless you use your robots and block them. Yeah, or even stuff like sometimes when you're searching. I've seen a lot of E Comm sites have the search pages indexed because they haven't been properly put into the robots dealt with. Yeah.
[00:09:24] Michael: And this comes back to the topic of your crawl budget. Nobody knows exactly what a crawl budget is for any given site, but it's a concept.
[00:09:33] Arthur: Right.
[00:09:34] Michael: Like Google's crawler is only going to dedicate so much time to your site looking at stuff before it moves on because obviously they have their own server resources and stuff. They don't want to waste time crawling sites that are not adding any value. So you want to be optimized with your crawl budget. You want to be sending that crawler to. Stuff that's valuable comes down to things like internal links and content as well, like making sure products aren't too deep in your index. So by too deep, I mean you have to click like 27 times from the homepage to get to them. That's all the sort of stuff. Am I missing anything here?
[00:10:10] Arthur: Well, I think canonical tags. So making sure you don't have too many products, if you have different product variations you don't want Google to see and crawl index all of them, you should always have one specific original product that you want indexed.
[00:10:23] Michael: Explain a canonical tag.
[00:10:24] Arthur: So canonical tag is basically just a bit of code that you put on a page which when Google crawls and sees it basically tells Google that hey, this isn't the original page and it links to the original page. So like the URL of the original page, so all the value gets passed on to that original page. So if you've got, for example, a product with maybe 20 different different variations, sizes, colors or whatever, what you would do is you would have a canonical tag to the original product and then rather than Google indexing all 20 of those, it would just put all the value into. Into that one.
[00:10:57] Michael: Yeah.
[00:10:58] Arthur: How was that?
[00:10:59] Michael: Perfect. Love it. So it's really just all that sort of stuff.
[00:11:04] Arthur: Yes.
[00:11:05] Michael: We could talk crawl a bit. We could do a whole episode on crawlability and indexability.
[00:11:08] Arthur: Maybe we will one day.
[00:11:09] Michael: Maybe. But let's move to the second key theme or bucket of eCommerce, SEO, which is this is a massive one site speed, which is how fast the page loads. Massive for user experience, massive for conversion, massive for SEO.
[00:11:27] Arthur: Yes.
[00:11:28] Michael: This is an area where if you're running your SEO yourself or you're not working with an agency, often you can see things like people uploading a image file that's like 10 megabytes in size and not compressing it and running into all sorts of problems with it. But then also stuff with like code. We spoke about code bloat before. Not minifying your code, compressing your code, not adding caching, maybe not using a CDN if you are international. All that sort of stuff is what sits within site speed and performance. Yeah, agree. I had some interesting stats somewhere here about site speed and performance because speed. Right. 40% of visitors will abandon a site that takes over three seconds to load. Did you know that?
[00:12:15] Arthur: Let's count that. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi.
[00:12:21] Michael: You might be in the 60% that don't.
[00:12:23] Arthur: Yeah, I mean that can. Yeah, there's a lot of variables that come down to that because the site might not load just because of your, say, if you're on the phone, your. Your network. Right.
[00:12:32] Michael: Yeah, but what.
[00:12:32] Arthur: Yeah, no, I know what you're trying to say.
[00:12:33] Michael: The point is people are impatient.
[00:12:35] Arthur: Oh yeah, that's very true. I'm impatient.
[00:12:36] Michael: Amazon found that a 100 milligram second delay costs them 1% in sales.
[00:12:40] Arthur: I believe that. I believe that three seconds is. I think it's a short amount of time. But if you're constantly having to wait three seconds every time a page loads, that adds up painful. The frustration builds up.
[00:12:52] Michael: Walmart saw a 2% increase in conversions for every 1 second of improvement in load speed.
[00:12:57] Arthur: Yeah, I believe that.
[00:12:58] Michael: So anyway, that's just stuff that I've pulled off the web trying to. It's pretty obvious, right? Yeah, fast sites are better.
[00:13:05] Arthur: How would you go about looking or how would you measure that? So how would you figure out how fast your site is?
[00:13:11] Michael: You use a tool GT Metrics, Page Speed Insights, one of them. Load it into them and just see what the reports say. Often it will give recommendations around stuff you can be doing. Go ahead and implement of that what you can.
[00:13:24] Arthur: Yep.
[00:13:25] Michael: For sure, look at your core web vitals, all that sort of stuff. But the big ones are always going to be like fast hosting, which if you're using Shopify and the like, it should be pretty good.
[00:13:34] Arthur: Yep.
[00:13:34] Michael: But then making sure, as I said before, you've got all your caching running, you keep your code as streamlined as possible. And then images is a massive one. So making sure they're compressed and whether that comes down to when you create them, making sure the file size is small. Which is just good practice, but then also having some sort of optimization plugin or tool or service that you put them through so that the file size is as small as possible.
[00:14:00] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:14:00] Arthur: Most CMSs would be. Would have that built into it these days.
[00:14:05] Michael: And if they don't, there's plugins, there's a browser, there's extensions, you know, apps, whatever. Yeah. Make your site fast, nice and quick. The next pillar is the ux, so user experience and then mobile experience. So last episode you were very taken by the concept of like a search plugin as like just essential because it improves user experience. Right. So it's basically just trying to make your site seamless and fun friend. Like not fun but user friendly, user friendly.
[00:14:36] Arthur: Make it as easy as possible for the user to find what they're looking for. That's basically it.
[00:14:41] Michael: Have a mobile first approach to it. Probably 100%.
[00:14:46] Arthur: Unless you're like a B2B where a lot of users are sitting at a laptop or computer looking for you. Most people would be mobile first. So make sure that your site is mobile first.
[00:14:55] Michael: Yep.
[00:14:56] Arthur: Make sure that the whole process is seamless from finding the product to checking out everything. So a lot of people used to neglect that, but now I think the mindset has changed. People understand it's mobile first.
[00:15:07] Michael: Yeah. So mobile first. Have great search in your like.
[00:15:12] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:15:13] Michael: Buyers, guys, categories make it like valuable. So videos or like calculators, tools they can use that keep them on the page, engaged with it.
[00:15:20] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:15:21] Michael: Signposting to other parts of the site so that they move through the site and use the site and. And don't just bounce back to Google.
[00:15:27] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:15:27] Arthur: And I guess for those that didn't listen to the previous episode, the search functionality that you mentioned, super important because a lot of people don't have the patience to go through and try and navigate through every single category to find what they're looking for. If you've got a good search functionality, they can just search for the product. The new ones, like the new ones are not that new. But modern search functionality will be dynamic and live where products will start to appear. Categories, suggestions, things like that, sites that don't utilize that, you know, the old school sites where you have to fully type in what you're searching for. It generates a search page, often doesn't show you the product that you're looking for. That's going to cost you a lot of possible conversions.
[00:16:06] Michael: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:16:07] Arthur: Possible customers. So again, very easy to implement.
[00:16:11] Michael: The other thing I would say checkout process is important. Most stores shopify Looks good out of the box.
[00:16:17] Arthur: Shopify does. Other CMSs can be a bit hit or miss, but it's insane to having from experience seen how much of an impact improving your checkout process can have on conversion and revenue.
[00:16:28] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:16:28] Arthur: You know, little things like, you know, like multi step for specific e comm sites. Huge impact.
[00:16:35] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:16:35] Arthur: So a lot of. If you can spend a lot of time and effort in CRO and trying to like nail down on that, you can see like great results.
[00:16:43] Michael: Yeah. And great results on that will then also improve your SEO, of course, the user signals. All right, that is three down. We've got two to go. We're going to talk content next. Now we've got a whole episode coming up on the content pillar of E commerce SEO. So we won't dwell on optimizing individual pages and the sorts of content that work on E commerce sites because that's what that episode will cover. But from a technical point of view, there's stuff you can be doing with your content set up on the site to get the most bang for your buck or performance out of Google. So an example of that is going to be your templates, your category page templates, your product page templates, making sure that you're doing all of the SEO essentials, the basics. Well, so headings, H1 tag, keywords, all that stuff. Subsequent heading tags, FAQs, just really do the work, the basics on the page. Because a lot of people don't. They might have the H1 tag as some random bit of text on there that is irrelevant, for example.
[00:17:47] Arthur: Exactly. Yeah. And then, yeah, build that template out so you can roll it out and you don't have to worry about it for new categories that you're rolling out in the future.
[00:17:54] Michael: Yeah, exactly.
[00:17:55] Arthur: Likewise for products.
[00:17:56] Michael: Yeah, products, you want to be getting as much data into that page.
[00:18:00] Arthur: Product descriptions, we touched on that. Making sure that they're unique, well written, no excuses. With AI.
[00:18:07] Michael: Well, no, that will be in the. That will be more of the actual content optimization work from a technical point of view.
[00:18:13] Arthur: Oh yes. Okay. We'll give away too much.
[00:18:15] Michael: It'll be like spoiler for next. Yeah, Arthur's getting ahead of himself here. It'd be things that just the name of the product, the product model number. If you're selling like commoditized product like that, images, that sort of stuff.
[00:18:27] Arthur: Agree.
[00:18:27] Michael: Big one in this world is a schema markup as well. So schema is basically code that you include in a page that makes it easier for search engines to understand what that page is about. So it's like you're speaking their language in a way in the code. So examples might be, if your products have reviews, making sure that the review score is marked up with product review schema, so that when Google lands on it, it can see that, you know, it's got 5,000 reviews, 4.7 star rating. And it might show that in the search results, which is a nice. You see the visual stars in the search results. It makes it more appealing to click on.
[00:19:08] Arthur: Yep.
[00:19:09] Michael: With eecom, there's all sorts of product schema that you can put in, like.
[00:19:14] Arthur: Price, all that stuff.
[00:19:15] Michael: Price, whether it's in stock or out of stock, which is a big one.
[00:19:18] Arthur: Very important.
[00:19:18] Michael: We'll touch on that in a minute. What else does it do? Like variants, all that sort of stuff. Colors, sizes, all that sort of stuff.
[00:19:28] Arthur: There's a lot.
[00:19:29] Michael: All the stuff that would be relevant for a product should be coded up. Now, a lot of the platforms offer this. It's not always set up properly on every site. It also can influence your appearance in organic Google shopping. So let's chat that. Because, you know, Google shopping is typically something you pay for.
[00:19:51] Arthur: Mm.
[00:19:51] Michael: The paid sponsored ads at the top. Yeah, with product images, everyone knows them, but there are free ones too.
[00:19:57] Arthur: That's it.
[00:19:58] Michael: Yeah, you want to be in. But how do you get in them?
[00:20:00] Arthur: Well, the way you do that is you have to set up merchant center account. So typically done for paid ads. But if you wanted to start showing your products organically, you set this up. And typically by default, Google should start showing your products organically, depending on the search, depending on the product. And then I guess for existing accounts, you just can make sure that it's enabled. But yeah, this is a good way to start getting more traffic to your products. Having them appear in the product feed. Yeah, very simple.
[00:20:35] Michael: So have your merchant center set up and then that combined with really strong product schema data on the pages, will give you the best shot at showing in those three results. So look, I guess from a content point of view, it's just having the basics done really well from a programmatic point of view or a template point of view on the site. So that when you then go and do extra work, adding content, buyer's guides, FAQs and that sort of stuff, you've got the foundation there. As we said at the start, it's all foundational stuff. This technical SEO.
[00:21:07] Arthur: That.
[00:21:08] Michael: Fair enough, we're done with that.
[00:21:09] Arthur: Let's move on.
[00:21:10] Michael: You're happy to wrap that one up and kick into the Final one here which is security and accessibility. Security and, and so we sort of combine it. So like accessibility is just like when people access the site, like it all making sense and working the right way so to speak. And then security is the obvious SSL.
[00:21:31] Arthur: Certificate HTTPs, which is really a no brainer.
[00:21:34] Michael: Every site. Have you come across an E commerce site that isn't?
[00:21:39] Arthur: Well no, I mean it's only if their SSL certificate is expired. But other than that every site it's rare that I find a site that isn't HTTPs.
[00:21:48] Michael: Yeah. So that's a no brainer. Another one is hreflang maybe.
[00:21:53] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:21:54] Michael: So to explain what that is, if you have your site in different languages, maybe targeting different locations, you can use hreflang tags in the code to tell Google, all right, this page is the US English version, but here are the Spanish and German and Dutch equivalents of the page. So that Google knows basically.
[00:22:17] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:22:18] Michael: Which one to favor in which market. And that multiple versions of the same page exist in different languages. So this is important for sites obviously that operate in different geographical regions or target different languages. Even different languages within the one country. Maybe U.S. and Spanish. U.S. english and Spanish in the U.S.
[00:22:36] Arthur: For example, English and French in Canada.
[00:22:39] Michael: There you go.
[00:22:39] Arthur: I like that one.
[00:22:40] Michael: There you go. I can't think of a third example of that.
[00:22:43] Arthur: Well, we're just twos enough. Plenty.
[00:22:46] Michael: Another one here would be redirects. This is a big one in the world.
[00:22:50] Arthur: Yeah, right. How do you, how do you handle products that are out of stock?
[00:22:55] Michael: How do you.
[00:22:56] Arthur: Depends. Well look, if you're, if you've got a product that is temporarily out of stock, you, you leave it. You leave it because you don't want to keep, keep removing and adding the product over and over. If it's ranking, well, leave it. Just make sure it's clearly marked out of stock. Even better if you can put some sort of indicator as to when it's going to be back in stock. But if you know if the product isn't coming back, there's two trains of thought. You can either leave it and let it. 404 people hate 404s. Think it's like the end of the world. Google expects to see 404s. 404 isn't a bad thing. It just means the page no longer exists. Other people like to redirect it back to the category or a similar product. Look, if you're running a huge ecommerce site, you can't just keep going and adding in redirects after every product. Is out of stock otherwise. I mean, you probably can, but it's just going to cause a lot of redirects. And if we're talking about crawlability, it's just going to make it more complicated for Google to crawl.
[00:23:53] Michael: So you just let it drop off. It will drop out of your index, your sitemap and in time Google sees it's a 404 and then it will drop it out of its index itself.
[00:24:04] Arthur: That's it.
[00:24:05] Arthur: Yeah.
[00:24:06] Michael: So, yeah, that's like. I guess there'll be. It's Horses for Courses.
[00:24:10] Arthur: Horses for Courses.
[00:24:10] Michael: Depends how big your site is, how resourced you are.
[00:24:13] Arthur: If you have like a very, very popular product that's got a lot of search volume, that drives a lot of traffic, you can probably redirect it to back to the category so people can see your other products. But if it's just a regular product that doesn't. Yeah, you know, it doesn't rank, doesn't do anything. What's the point? Yeah, what's the point? Yeah, it's all about trying to keep that traffic. So if it's not generating traffic, you don't need to redirect it.
[00:24:35] Michael: I would make sure that your schema in the page updates if the product's out of stock as well.
[00:24:40] Arthur: So that.
[00:24:40] Michael: That's all clear. So again, this is all automated, so it will if you set it up the right way. What about seasonal products? Like do you like to leave a page up year round? Let's say I do, yes. Yeah, so do I.
[00:24:50] Arthur: So like if it's a say for a Valentine's Day, it's something that's seasonal. A lot of clients I've worked with would remove the page. I just like to keep it indexed in the background. Just remove the products. Who cares if someone lands on it? No one's going to be searching for it anyway.
[00:25:05] Michael: Yeah.
[00:25:05] Arthur: Thing is, if you remove it then you have to go back to the effort of trying to get it to rank again.
[00:25:09] Michael: Yeah.
[00:25:09] Arthur: So just keep it.
[00:25:10] Michael: Yep. Maybe demote it in your navigation.
[00:25:13] Arthur: Of course, yes. But just keep it indexed 100%.
[00:25:17] Michael: Well, anyway, I think this has been a good little intro to the technical world for E commerce. Few little food for thoughts in there. Foods for thought or food for thought. Whatever.
[00:25:28] Arthur: Food for thought, yeah.
[00:25:30] Michael: Bit of food for thought in there for you. If you are operating an E commerce site, have a little look at it through those different buckets, see what you find. We're going to be back with episode three where we dig into content in more detail. Then we're wrapping things up with everybody's favorite topic.
[00:25:48] Arthur: Link building.
[00:25:49] Michael: Link building. Free link building. So we'll see you in the next episode. But until then, happy SEO Ing.
[00:25:54] Arthur: Bye Bye.
[00:25:55] Intro & Outro: Thanks for listening to the SEO Show. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help the show. We'll see you in the next episode.