Hello,

I have a number of discontinued products that I deleted from SC's product listings using the manage products page and clicking the delete link. These products are no longer showing when browsing the categories on my site.

However, because the product's URL's are still indexed by Google, people are able to access these product pages I have deleted via Google links. They are even able to purchase a deleted product on my site.

Any suggestions on how to correct this issue?

Thanks - Alex
DNN 6.2 , SC version 5.30

Thanks Kevin - This is exactly what I needed.

Alex

Hi Alex,
We will look into this but as an interim solution you can add url's to your robots.txt in the root of your site that you dont want crawled by google and other search engines.

Thanks,

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Scott Kelly
Project Manager

Hi Alex,
We have fixed the discontinued product flag and the hotfix will be in the next cart v5.45 scheduled for release next week.

To list all your deleted products issue the following sql statement from SSMS:

select * from smith_products where logicallydeleted = 1

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Scott Kelly
Project Manager

Scott -

I was wondering if you could explain a bit more how you fixed this issue, and the rationality behind the changes.

I was testing how a logically deleted product appears to someone who finds the page via an indexed Google link. From what I can tell, the user who navigates to a logically deleted product is shown the error "No Product ID Exists" on the product page, and that is it.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. First off, it gives the impression that our website is somehow broken. Not good under any circumstance. Secondly, the page has already been indexed by Google, so it will check it again even though all direct links have been removed. If Google sees a blank page with an error message, that can act negatively against a site's google ranking. Thirdly, it assumes that because a product is longer available for sale, the information for that product is then useless. This is definitely not the case.

All the "big boy" e-commerce websites that I know of do not simply get rid of product pages that are no longer available for sale. They keep the pages up, with a message that the product is no longer available, and they remove the checkout button. It sort of makes the product page "archived", while still being able to receive traffic from that page. Because the product on that page is no longer available for sale can in some cases make the page even more valuable from a traffic standpoint, as the competition for that product's keywords would greatly decrease.

All that being said, I'm curious what Smith Cart's stance is on deactivated products. I know that you said you've fixed the issue. How did you fix it? Is the behavior of deactivated products on my site normal?

Thanks -
Alex

Thanks for the reply Kevin.

This solution is really close to what I want, but with just a single hitch. I can change the image and text to show "discontinued" instead of "sold out" on the product page, but this does not remove the product from the buy now listing pages. It can still be navigated to by the product's categories.

Now, I know I can go into the product's options and manually remove it from all categories, but I have a problem with that. In order for me to correctly update all my "deactivated" products to "sold out" I'll need to go in one by one and do this. Because my website operates on over 44 buy now pages, I will have to open each product in the correct buy.now page, otherwise the categories will not show up. Quite the time consuming task.

This also removes my ability to show both "sold out" and "discontinued" products on my site. I can only have one or the other. I can understand why the cart was programmed in this way, but here is a quick suggestion on how to do these product "status's"

1. Sold Out - Perfect as is. Because an item is sold out, does not mean you want to remove it from being viewed, just that you currently do not have any stock. Great work on this product status. Just a note, the add to cart button still exists on the page for this status, and clicking it shows the user a sold out error message. Would it not be better to just simply remove the add to cart button?

2. Discontinued (This status does not currently exist in the cart) - This product "status" in my mind means that the product is sold out, and will never again be available for purchase. a.k.a. "discontinued". This status should disable checkout and remove the product from all categories. However the page will still be available for reference viewing with a direct link. The add to cart button should be removed.

3. Deactivated - This is in my mind what "deactivated" should be. This is the admin telling the cart "This item is sold out, discontinued, I do not want people to view a reference page, and I do not want the item to show up in my product data". Also - this status should most DEFINITELY add a no follow meta tag to the page header to let the search engines know the page is done.

All of these status keep the product in the database to prevent error messages on past purchases. I hope this makes sense.

This is good Kevin - I'll just have to manually add in the "discontinued" message for those products. Thanks!