Help needed: URL changes/website restructuring impact on SERP

Hello SEO/SERP gurus,

I have to take down my products off my website. I will be able to put new products on it but in few months!! I'm keeping my site and main pages online, only hiding/deleting/restructuring the products.

Question is, how do I put them back if the new products will a bit be different, for imaginary example, previously t-shirts for adults and now t-shirts for children (still very similar products, definitely some URL changes) with the least impact on rankings?
Currently a decent amount of my products are on 1st page in SERP. Got 550 products indexed by the big G. It took well over a year to finally get it to index my page organically, once in a week or 2 but still, don't want to lose the progress.

Should I change the URL for when the new items go online and put a 301 redirect to new ones?
Should I keep the items as "out of stock" until I get the new ones online or hide all until I got stock?
Should I just wave goodbye to all (item wise, the main pages stay) and start from scratch?
What's the best way to approach this scenario to take the least possible losses in SERP and in the eyes of big G.

KindNoob said:

Should I change the URL for when the new items go online and put a 301 redirect to new ones?

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if the URL contains the word "children" it's obviously not a good idea to 301 this URL to a page about adult t-shirts. Besides, you just said that it's possible in the future to add the same products back to their original page, so what are you going to do in that case? Remove the 301, or 301 again but to a different URL? It's not smart to 301 the same URL so often...

Just create a page called "t-shirts" (and name the URL with general terms like "t-shirts", without mentioning kids, adults, women, boys, etc...) and put all t-shirts on that page and let the people filter the products with the help of a filtering / sorting plugin. And also don't forget to 301 all relevant URLs (the adult t-shirts URL, and children t-shirts URL) to the new one, otherwise you might indeed lose the rankings when google crawls the pages again and sees that they're 404 because you've deleted them...

KindNoob said:

Should I keep the items as "out of stock" until I get the new ones online or hide all until I got stock?

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putting a "out of stock" message on those pages is a smart idea indeed. But - at the same time - also add a link on the same page that takes people to related products, and also post a message on the same page that's something like "these products are out of stock, but they'll be back soon. In the meantime, check out these related products..."

I don't think that hiding the page is a smart idea because if people click on the URL of the hidden page via google and they land on a 404 page they might click back, which will lower the engagement and time on site metrics of your site, while also increasing the bounce rate. And all of these things can hurt your rankings.

KindNoob said:

Should I just wave goodbye to all and start from scratch (item wise, the main pages stay)?

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I mean, that's up to you and to your resources and dedication

Personally, if it took me 1 year to rank this site and now I had to make a choice (assuming that the site doesn't have 1000s of product pages that need to be 301'd and / or re-designed) I would try to make this site work instead of starting anew. But maybe you're not like me, so I don't know, it's really up to you...

KindNoob said:

What's the best way to approach this scenario to take the least possible losses in SERP and in the eyes of big G.

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301-ing

KindNoob said:

I'm keeping my site and main pages online, only hiding/deleting/restructuring the products.

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um, so what will your visitors see when they click in google and land on those pages? They'll see that all of the products on all of the pages are gone, and then they'll click on the back button, which will hurt the SEO metrics that google analyzes (engagement, dwell time, bounce rate, etc) and they'll assume that your site is poor quality and they'll wipe out your rankings.

I think you should take it 1 page at a time, starting with your most important / highest ranking / most visited / most profitable pages, and recreate / restructure these pages the way you want and when they're done you can 301 those important / ranking / visited / profitable URLs to the new (restructured) URLs.

tazarbm said:

putting a "out of stock" message on those pages is a smart idea indeed. But - at the same time - also add a link on the same page that takes people to related products, and also post a message on the same page that's something like "these products are out of stock, but they'll be back soon. In the meantime, check out these related products..."

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I think the above is your best option.

If google sees your pages go 404 it's not good and could reflect on the whole website if you have too many of them.

Thank you so much for your input tazarbm!

You brought some valid points I didn't think about before (like engagement, bounce rate, where should they land), haven't really done much SEO on it for the last 9 months (out of almost 3 years I've had the site) as the hard work I put in the beginning placed me in top positions and over time my product rankings kept climbing, so I'm a bit rusty ha ha

The t-shirt example was badly thought out, sorry about that - my niche is really a niche so talking about the actual products/categories would be even more confusing.
The target audience will be the same but broadened out, so it's more like "unisex" rather than "women" or "men" t-shirts and I don't want to keep "women/men" in url with similar small adjustments so most urls will change. They will be "the same, the same but different" products so my gut was saying to redirect all my 1100 products to their new versions but my brain was screaming "what would Google think?!" if I redirected 1000 urls to new ones..

I was afraid to 301 them as I don't know how SE reacts to those (I think I saw some previous pages taken off index) but taking into consideration people opening the 404 pages and bouncing, I guess the 301s are better even if the original links get deindexed.

Will have to think how to grab the attention of people checking on the out of stock products as the new ones are not coming in until 2025.. And move them to some unlisted page so the old products (until redesigned) are accessible only through SE.

Wow, so many things and ideas to think about.. THANK YOU SO MUCH for taking your time to respond!

KindNoob said:

Will have to think how to grab the attention of people checking on the out of stock products as the new ones are not coming in until 2025

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that's a lot of time. I think you should not worry about this until you have the products ready, save yourself some time and haadaches

KindNoob said:

And move them to some unlisted page so the old products (until redesigned) are accessible only through SE.

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yeah, you could do this. Just be sure to make these pages private and hide their URLs, if you're on Wordpress I think there is a plugin that hides the URLs, or maybe your theme could do it...

KindNoob said:

redirect all my 1100 products to their new versions but my brain was screaming "what would Google think?!" if I redirected 1000 urls to new ones..

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dang, that's a lot of redirecting. But hey, if you must, you must!

I think google will not "think" anything. They'll just crawl your pages again and discover the redirects and update their index...

I think there is a smarter way of doing all of these redirects at once, but I don't know it. All I know is that I've read something similar a few months ago and I remember that there were only a few lines of code that you had to place (in htaccess I believe) and all of those pages would redirect to your chosen location. But this might not work if you have multiple locations to redirect to, in that case you'd have to 301 each URL individually.

Hopefully someone can help you better as tech is not my strong point...

PS: please use quotes next time, otherwise I will miss your replies.

As Tazarbm said, do not use the same URLs for different products. This is misleading for the customers and will probably not rank because the title and content are the same.

I recommend leaving the out-of-stock products pages as they were before and adding a related products section on those pages.

tazarbm said:

that's a lot of time. I think you should not worry about this until you have the products ready, save yourself some time and haadaches


yeah, you could do this. Just be sure to make these pages private and hide their URLs, if you're on Wordpress I think there is a plugin that hides the URLs, or maybe your theme could do it...


dang, that's a lot of redirecting. But hey, if you must, you must!

I think google will not "think" anything. They'll just crawl your pages again and discover the redirects and update their index...

I think there is a smarter way of doing all of these redirects at once, but I don't know it. All I know is that I've read something similar a few months ago and I remember that there were only a few lines of code that you had to place (in htaccess I believe) and all of those pages would redirect to your chosen location. But this might not work if you have multiple locations to redirect to, in that case you'd have to 301 each URL individually.

Hopefully someone can help you better as tech is not my strong point...

PS: please use quotes next time, otherwise I will miss your replies.

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Sorry 2024.. The older I get the harder it's to track the current year It's going to be dead for 4-6 months until the supplier sorts their stuff out. That's why I was stressing out as I won't have anything to sell for 4-6 months but also didn't want to lose my credibility in the eyes for SE or potential customers so I could pick up where I left off when the new stock is available. I think the plan is more or less clear to me now.

I'm not using wordpress so there's no automation but 301 is easily done on the product page by editing the item and checking the box to enable redirect to the new link which I can just type in as I see fit. I saved myself some headache by paying for a website builder with hosting included as my previous wordpress sites have been pure pain and my sanity is worth more to me than 50$ per month. Re-doing/editing 1000 items just comes with the job, doesn't even earn me that much (comparing to so many stories here) but you know what they say - money doesn't stink and it's an extra income I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Black Belt Spodermen said:

As Tazarbm said, do not use the same URLs for different products. This is misleading for the customers and will probably not rank because the title and content are the same.

I recommend leaving the out-of-stock products pages as they were before and adding a related products section on those pages.

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It's going to be very similar products like "womens-cat-t-shit" to "unisex-sleeping-cat-t-shirt", same products with minor adjustments, 98% of the time by opening the new item by the old SE result would still be exactly what the customer is looking for but it feels too misleading/off-putting to have slightly mismatching (like in the example) url to me. Often enough I see customers doing a small test purchase to check if their order will actually get delivered and then go on a spending spree so I do whatever I can to make my site seem trustworthy. It's a small line between the test purchase and leaving for competitors. Most customers probably won't care but I don't want to risk losing a good customer over an url mismatch with the item.


In case someone is interested in the plan:
Mark all items out of stock and put them on a page that's not accessible directly from the site but still can be opened from SE.
Set chatbot to answer most of the stock related questions and prepare to chat with people needing a personal touch.
Put an engagement piece above or below the item to keep people on the site as long as possible. Maybe add a discount code pop up in exchange for their email to send promo mail once we're up and running again.
Edit the items as I get info from the supplier (urls, update the description and photos), move them back to visible part of the site marked as out of stock but coming soon.
Make them available as soon as I'm able to deliver.

the pop-up is a great idea to try to collect contacts while you wait for product.

We show any item that has sold-out as "out of stock" on our ecommerce site (about 10,000 unique items) and Google seems to like that. Sometimes the out of stock items show as a 410 instead of 404.