Welcome to the Q&A Forum

@prettyyoung Thanks for that. Much appreciated and agreed!

@miriamellis Thank you very much for taking the time to have a look for me. The same concerns i had were confirmed in your reply. Thank you for the sound advice..

Cheers

Scott

@miriamellis Hi there, sure no problem,

the directory is made up of 150 domains like this one

https://mechanicsnearme.com.au/

Then there are 149 more industries and then pages for each suburb in Australia.

You can see them here:

https://mechanicsnearme.com.au/providers

https://mechanicsnearme.com.au/locations

and advertising info is here:

https://mechanicsnearme.com.au/advertise

Thank you very much in advance.

Hi there, I have a client who wants to advertise in a local directory along the lines of "find your nearest plumber". The directory only has paid listings and they are follow links and they also mention your site or generated landing page may get a nice bump on google.

Is there a risk that they may get a penalty for using this directory? The client wants to use it regardless of if it gives them an SEO boost but obviously wants to avoid any penalties at all costs.

Thoughts on this?

Thanks in advance

Hi there,

This is something i have been unsure of for years. It's a little different to most ecom website  situations. What would you do with product pages when every product is a "one off" unique product and once sold will never be for sale again?

Should i redirect to a category page? 404? Leave it as is marked as sold or say it is sold and show links to similar items?

At the moment we have 700 products for sale but over 5000 sold products that have their own product page and my concern is as this grows it could become a lot for a WordPress woocommerce site to handle?

I don't want to do anything to slow my site down or unnecessarily bloat it but i want to do the right thing by the visitor and also not do anything to hurt my rankings.

These pages often rank in google and may have been there for years before the item actually sells. To throw another curve ball, there may be multiple other products (for sale or already sold) with the exact same name but are unique and different from each other.

These products pages will often be 98% the same content as each other too.

To explain how this could be the case, we sell artworks from many different artists, Every artwork is an original and is unique. But many artists paint the same subject matter multiple times, albeit in a slightly different way from previous times.

So you end up with a unique product that has everything the same as another (same artist, same name of artwork, same size, same description, different image, different sku)  but is actually different and unique.

This has left me somewhat uncertain of what is best to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you