John Mueller Google Hangouts Session: Expired Product Pages and Country Folder Structures

Google frequently arranges live Google Hangout sessions online, hosted by its Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, who runs one-on-one sessions with a select group of search specialists.

Dan Picken, of Ingenuity Digital’s sister company WMG, attends these sessions to ensure he’s at the leading edge of search science, asking the questions that will enable us to keep our clients’ businesses fully optimised online.

Google May Treat Expired Product Page Redirects As Soft 404s, Despite Being Redirected

Dan asked whether you can redirect a dead product page (where the product is no longer available), into a category in order to keep page rank.

Google’s John Mueller said that Google may treat pages that no longer let you buy a product as a soft 404, that’s whether you try to redirect that page to your home page, category page or an unrelated product.

This means that it won’t pass pagerank anyway, so when you’re thinking about building a redirect file for 404s to products, consider whether the budget and time could be better spent elsewhere.

Country Folder Structures And Pagerank

Dan asked whether different folder structures such as /gb, /es, /de and the like, which represent international sections, had links going to one country version of a page, would links also be needed for their international equivalent?

John Mueller responded that if the international sections are linked then pagerank will pass through as though it was a normal link. However, if they’re not linked, in the case of ahref lang tags then this wouldn’t pass pagerank and would require link building to the international areas, preferably from the same country. He advised that if a website ranks well in the UK it doesn’t automatically mean that the site will perform similarly for German users, as an example. Each country version needs to build up value on its own.