Automatically Create 301 Redirects When Deleting Products

Answered

Andrew Uhacz

• April 06, 2018 19:01

I just noticed there is a way when deleting categories to redirect products to another category but when deleting products you can redirect traffic from that URL to another category.

What happens if you delete a product and that item had traffic? If you don't create a 301 redirect it will go to a 404 page not found page.

Maybe Americommerce has another way your suppose to redirect when deleting products but I just tested the method on Shopify and it's really annoying. I'm thinking of coming back to Americommerce and I test these type of features and I hope that AC will see the value in making it easier to manage your store.

I think my idea is pretty clear but I can elaborate the issue if you got lost along the way ;)

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• Official comment

  

  AmeriCommerce Developer

  • November 15, 2018 22:57

  Good idea.  I would offer up that we do have a 301 redirect and rewrite module in the product today where you can put any FROM url and send it to a NEW url, which is handy just for this scenario.  In fact, if you change a custom url on a product, it will automatically create an entry in that tool for you already.  It doesn't create an entry today if you delete a product though. 

  One consideration is that since product deletion happens quite often (sometimes in the thousands for some stores), there is a high potential to really noise up the redirect engine with unimportant entries. 

  Another consideration is it's in your best interest to take a moment and decide for each url where you want the link juice to go vs. us making that decision for you automatically.  Sometimes it should go to the home page, or a blog post or a root category, etc.

  For those reasons, we recommend using the Redirect Engine built into the product, here's a how to in case you need it: https://support.americommerce.com/hc/en-us/articles/201903500-URL-Redirects 

  For this feature request, having the interface ask you if you'd like to create one of these redirects is still a valid and actionable idea, and we'll keep that in mind.  And if that feature is needed to convince you away from a competing platform, reach out to a salesperson here and maybe we can work something out.
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  Karen

  • April 11, 2018 18:45

  Seems like there used to be a Feature Request along these lines once upon a time.  I don't really have an issue with deleting products so much as that AC doesn't automatically create a new 301 redirect when any given url is changed... A popup message "Do you want to redirect traffic from the old url to the new url?" would at least give one the option to have the system create a 301 or not...

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  AmeriCommerce Developer

  • November 16, 2018 00:36

  Joshua broke out the popup prompt idea into it's own topic.  Thanks Joshua!  I'm linking here because they are related.

  https://support.americommerce.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360019774653-Prompt-to-redirect-deleted-products-or-changes-in-CustomURLs

  Also of note, is we didn't intend that 'Answered' meant we're not doing it, more that it had an alternative solution.  I wish our help portal had more coding options for these posts.

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