Hi all, need an advice here

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Helmut Berié: If the only thing that changes between seasons is the year number then leave that our of the URL and only target it with title, h1 and meta description. A lot of informational content but also ecommerce sites do it that way. if that is not "good enough" then redirecting it will have to be.
  
  Are we talking listing pages only or item pages as well? If it is item pages as well and specific to the current season why would you want to redirect it next year. Is that suggesting the 2023 collection is the equivalent of the 2022 collection? is that really what your customer wants to convey
  
  5d
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  Rudolf Ladyzhenskii: Helmut Berié Yes, it is items as well. Products from old collections are to be removed from front-end. Best if they can be deleted completely.What I worry about is items that are already indexed. If I am to delete such an item, index will keep the URL and accessing it will generate 404 which is bad for both search engines and users. So there are two options I see:1. Re-directing with 301 to most current category. This is a better experience for customers.2. Set product as "out of stock" so that landing page is still there but product can not be bought. This is better for search engines, but very annoying for customers
  
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  Helmut Berié: re 2 - OOS messages are really only interesting if the item returns re 1 - sure you can 301 for users but then why should users search for dated stock if the company`s value prop is "the latest and greatest", anyway nothing wrong with a 301 to clean up and spare customers the 404 message
  
  if you worry about indexed items getting re-crawled and the bots getting a 404, you shouldn`t be, unless it regularly affects, say 50% of indexed pages on the site.I believe Google is quite ok to crawl into 404s in the ecommerce context. things are in stock until they aren`t anymore, then the recommendation is a 404 unless you have a replacement item, in which case the 301 is acceptable.But then setting up thousands and thousands of 301s is also not ideal. It can take forever for Google to really believe you that the old pages are gone. You might have to consider redirect chains, you cannot bulk redirect into the same link target (you used to get soft 404s for that) so really neither of the options are perfect
  
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  Christine Hansen: Leave out the dates/years in URLs (even Mueller from Google Search Central think this is the best way to go about this). This way you win big on the existing SEO and SERPs. Personally, I leave a webshop. and find another. if I see more than one "Out of Stock" page - it annoys me a great deal. If choosing "Out of Stock"-model, it should be crystal clear above the fold (not hidden in small font) when entering the page.
  
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