We’ve a multiregion with multilanguage ecommerce site. Each country site has two or more languages based on the country. For example, Our Brazilian site has 2 languages but our US site has 6 different languages.
Now we’re closing down one of our country. Which has the biggest index in our country list. But we don’t know what to do before closing it. What do you guys suggest before loose organics or get banned?
Here is our scenarios:
Redirect all the traffic one of our other country
Completely close down the site and show “not found” all the indexed pages
Redirect all the indexed pages to our “Select your country” landing page
If they will still be able to do business with that site, that might be your best solution. e,g. You close your site for the Netherlands, but your Belgian site will now deal with all customers in the Netherlands.
[quote=“xxnone, post:1, topic:201811”]
Completely close down the site and show “not found” all the indexed pages
[/quote]If you are no longer doing business with that country, I’d sggest redirecting traffic to a page saying “Sorry, we no longer trade in (country). Thank you for your past business” or something similar. Something which makes it clear that the site has gone and will not be returning. Otherwise folk will be hunting for pages, or thinking they’ve made a mistake.
[quote=“xxnone, post:1, topic:201811”]
Redirect all the indexed pages to our “Select your country” landing page
[/quote]That could also work, but you should have a message on that page explaining that the site for (country) has now closed.
@TechnoBear thank you for your quick reply. We were thinking the “Redirect all the traffic one of our other country” scenario but we’ll no longer support the closing site’s customers. Because, we don’t have a support team for them. Do you still believe that redirecting all the index is the best solution for us?
Our another handicap is, this closed country is always on the top of the page at Google. Wherever we search one of our index, product, brand name, closed site’s results always showing up first. Even this wasn’t its country. So this redirecting thing, can solve that issue too? Because, we don’t want that country at the top of the search results anymore.
In that case, I think you should probably go with redirecting to the “choose your country” page, and add a note to that explaining that you no longer trade in (country). Or, as I said, you could redirect to a custom page explaining the site for that country has closed. Either way, you need to explain that you’ve ceased business in that country and can no longer support customers there.
A 301 (permanent) redirect tells search engines that the page has permanently moved, and they will remove it from their index. I’m not sure how long this may take, but it will happen automatically. If you’re using Google Search Console (used to be Webmaster Tools), then this might help: