A JSON-LD for SEO who sells wines sent me a question about how to organize his products that change from year-to-year.
I sell wine in my shop, so there's a new vintage every year. I was wondering if it is better to create a new product page every year, or to simply edit the old product page with the new data and create a redirect? What does make more sense SEO-wise?
You could create a new product page or use the older one, but I think using the existing one would be better for a few reasons.
- the old page is older so Google will have more trust in it VS the new page would have to start from 0.
- the old page is probably indexed by Google VS the new page isn't indexed and it could take some time before Google sees it.
- the old page might have links pointing to it from other sites, which helps the page rank in the search results VS the new page has 0 links.
- the old page might have Rich Snippets already VS the new page won't.
That said, I'd handle updating the product in a specific way:
First, make sure the url is for the product and not the vintage or year. So /products/bulgarini-lugana-doc and not /products/bulgarini-lugana-doc-2016.
You can rename the existing products to use a non-vintage and put in page redirects from the older, vintage-based urls. It'd be a one time SEO drop to remove the vintages from the urls but it'll last for only a couple months while Google updates.
The, if the product description changes from vintage to vintage (I don't know wine so I'm not sure), include all of the vintages you sell or have sold in the description. e.g.
(Header) 2016
It has traces of fruit with a strong apple....
(Header) 2015
The apple taste is more pronounced this year...
Finally, I'd change each vintage to be a variant. e.g. 2016, 2015, etc. Then you can take advantage of Shopify's inventory, variant images, variant prices, and everything else for the vintages.
That's how I'd approach products like wine that change every year. It's a bit of work but it could let you have fewer pages that are more powerful overall, with more content on each one.
Once great optimization is to make sure your product's structured data is setup correctly for Google's Rich Snippets. With those you'll get more traffic and better converting traffic.
You can either audit your store's structured data by hand or install JSON-LD for SEO and have all the structured data you need.
It's already helping over two thousand Shopify stores with their structured data and it could help you too.
Eric Davis