"Hidden" Category, Page or Product - visible to search engines?

General General Questions
1

Hi,



I wonder if products, pages or categories under “HIDDEN” status are visible to search engines.

If not, do you have any suggestion on how to make them visible to search engines?

I am looking for ways to create more content and pages on my website but do not want to confuse my customers with too many visible pages/categories.

2

Hidden is hidden from view but still able to be crawled, or followed by a direct/indirect link and viewed/purchased.



John

3

Thanks John.



What do you mean by “indirect link”?

So, just to make sure, even if there isn't any link to these hidden pages from my website, search engines will still be able to crawl it? Or should I link to them from the footer?

4

By indirect link I meant perhaps your link is picked up by another bot or website and google can also link to you by that link too.

You can also add the page manually to the google webmaster tools to get it crawled and dont forget it will be in your sitemap too





John

5

Thanks!

6

[quote]and dont forget it will be in your sitemap too[/quote]



Stumbled on this thread after playing with disabled vs hidden products… I have changed all of our discontinued products to Hidden, so as to not mess up the search indexes (404's) until I am sure I won't ever be carrying them.



However, none of my hidden products show up in our sitemap. ?



Thoughts?

7

Hidden = Hidden from view. Will not show up anywhere, but the page content is displayed and the URL does not return a 404 error.



If your products are discontinued and you have a new version of the same product, use one of the 3rd party addons which provide redirects (such as Canonical Addon by CS Cart Rocks) so you can set your discontinued product to disabled and then redirect the discontinued product to the new product, or redirect the discontinued product URL to the products' category URL.

8

Thanks, Stellar, understood.



So, if I just disabled all of my discontinued products and did nothing more, would Google/engines punish me, or would they eventually just drop out of the indexes? I know that's not really an option as the 404's will frustrate customers, but just curious.



Thanks again.

9

Google will just de-index the product pages. However, if you already have backlinks to these pages, you may find it advantageous for both SEO purposes and your customers if you redirect to the latest model if possible, or the product category page where relevant. Use common sense for redirecting pages. Is the page redirected to actually useful for the purpose of replacing the old page? If not, don't redirect, let Google drop it and work on the new product page rankings.

10

Stellar, understood again.



We're just changing lines and sizes, and no current product really matches the old ones. New SEO names, new photo names and alt's, etc. But we're also going from around 650 products to about 50, so I'm going to get a lot of not found errors in the meantime while they drop out. ?



Just wondering which is going to be better :



a ) hidden status, mark as sold out, but still indexed and driving traffic to our site from existing links and images, or



b ) disabled status, let the 404's drop out, but risk a lot of not founds by customers in the meantime.





Thanks again!

11

[quote name='wwgreen' timestamp='1385488669' post='172411']

Stellar, understood again.



We're just changing lines and sizes, and no current product really matches the old ones. New SEO names, new photo names and alt's, etc. But we're also going from around 650 products to about 50, so I'm going to get a lot of not found errors in the meantime while they drop out. ?



Just wondering which is going to be better :



a ) hidden status, mark as sold out, but still indexed and driving traffic to our site from existing links and images, or



b ) disabled status, let the 404's drop out, but risk a lot of not founds by customers in the meantime.





Thanks again!

[/quote]

If they are completely different, let Google drop them out. Use a custom 404 page to entice those who land on the 404 to browse your new products. If it doesn't already exist (it should as default), create a new Location with Dispatch 'no_page' to create a custom 404. Now you can add custom text, products, categories, etc, into your 404 page.