Ecommerce SEO: How To Preserve Your Deep Link Juice
In yesterday’s installment of this week’s holiday SEO series, we covered hot product research and how to boost your rankings for these items’ product pages. One of the tactics was to target bloggers and other media for Christmas gift guides or product reviews.
Again, the more quality links a product page has pointing to it directly, the better chance it has of ranking well in search engines. Plus, a diverse link profile (you have some links pointing to deeper pages, not just your home page) makes your site look more authoritative as a whole to search engines.
So when you do acquire these deep links, you want to keep them. But often in ecommerce - product pages come and go. So it’s important to make sure your links still give you benefit even when pages disappear.
Problem: 404 Not Found
I recently searched for “top geek gifts” and found Wired Magazine’s Ultimate Geek Gift Guide from 2005. It links to 26 products - most are deep pages on the manufacturer or online retailers’ sites. Though an old list, it’s likely the page still gets a lot of traffic. It certainly ranks well, and the links are valuable to SEO forever.
But only a handful of these product pages still exist, a whopping 13 (that’s 50%!) of them are now Not Found pages with no links back into the site, and no suggested alternative products.

Bad for customers, bad for SEO.
Solution? 301 Redirect
Only 20% of the pages preserved the link juice by using a 301 permanent redirect. 3 sites redirected to the home page, while Alienware redirected the page to its Desktop Computer category (one more link for you, Alienware - Merry Christmas) and Sonos to its What to Buy section.
The 301 (permanent) redirect does 2 things - it sends a visitor to a real page on the site, and it tells search engines to pass along any incoming link “juice” (Page Rank) to the page that is redirected to. Whether you redirect to the home page, category page or similar product, the link pointing to your domain helps the overall link popularity of your domain. But redirecting to a category or alternative product page other than the home page is preferable for a few reasons:
- It’s more specific for the user. If you redirect the page for a wireless keyboard you no longer carry to all your wireless keyboards, it’s more relevant to the visitor than dumping them on the home page.
- It boosts the rankings for the category or page you direct it to.
- It keeps diversity in your link portfolio. Search engines like to see that not all your backlinks point to your home page - looks more natural, and looks like your deeper content is valuable.
How do you accomplish this? John Honeck has a great technical article for programmers on how to set up permanent 301 redirects on ecommerce templates in ASP.
You never know when someone will link to you or to what page, so it’s best to make this standard procedure for all your pages.
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Comments(9)


If an estimated 80% of sales start with a search engine year-round, you better believe consumers use search to find gifts for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day and so on. And they often include the holiday name in their search query. 

Today is Earth Day, and for weeks online retailers have been jumping on the green wagon in their marketing efforts, taking advantage of their eco-friendly and sustainable products and projects. 

In January, 


We do so much to encourage holiday gift shopping (or birthday, anniversary etc), but do we drop the ball in catering to the special needs of gift givers like gift boxes, gift wrapping, gift announcements / messages and gift receipts? 
This post is a companion to today’s Webinar “
Today is January 14th, which means we’re only one month away from what some believe is the 2nd largest retailing event of the year. Last year, Valentine’s Day raked in $905 Million in online sales.
Some believe December 24th is the busiest shopping day of the Christmas season, as everyone scrambles for last minute gifts, decor and food - at least in local stores. Holiday shipping deadlines are now behind us, so what do online merchants do? I went to check out the home pages of 100 of the Internet Retailer Top 500 expecting to see a lot of last-minute pitches for electronic gift certificates and in-store pick up. (Homepages were checked late in the evening on December 23).