Spilled Link Juice

So our store just passed up 2 years since launching on the PC platform.

We have had good growth and learned a lot, thanks to Early Impact.

One thing I have noticed is that over time our inactive and deleted product list has grown with the store.

I spend a lot of time building links and traffic to our website. Over time titles change and so do our links. I might end up with 5 different URL's linking to one product. Then my boss does something like removing products without me knowing. Yikes. So now I have links pointing to a message page that says this item is no longer in the store.

I have come up with a name for this. "spilled link juice"



Traffic is a gift that I don't like to waste.

I know that I can write redirects all day long into my webconfig file but honestly I don't have time, and I am not the one doing the deleting. So most of the dead ends being created are by people that don't understand what a dead end is.

So I built a custom modification that takes care of the issue.

If an product is changed to inactive or deleted a redirect reminder pops up and allows the user to point to another product or category.

So when a person clicks on one of my old links the viewer is taken to the new "redirected" product with a message that tells them why they were redirected.

"The product you were looking for is no longer sold, but here are some similar items."

Thus they view product and not msg.asp?message=95.

While this is probably isn't the best fix, it works and is simple.



Josh
josh@location3marketing.com
801 906-8396




Edited by joshs - 21-April-2011 at 2:32pm

As of right now it is not a 301 redirect. just a response.redirect
Debated on this. Occasionally products get resurrected from the dead. So it is nice to have the traffic remain if that is the case.

If I figure I could get some feed back concerning that from this forum.