How do I stop Google indexing my filter pages?

Canonicalise filtered views to the clean category URL and stop linking to combinations you do not want crawled. Use robots.txt disallow deliberately and second — it blocks the crawl that would read a noindex, stranding URLs already in the index.

Does my website need schema markup?

It is not a ranking factor, and it is worth adding. Structured data removes ambiguity about who you are and what you sell, which is what makes rich results possible and what answer engines increasingly parse in preference to guessing from prose.

Why are customers abandoning my checkout?

Most commonly because cost appears late — shipping, tax or fees revealed at the final step — or because an account is forced before purchase. Both are build decisions rather than marketing problems, and both are cheap to fix before launch.

E-commerce

What should I do with out of stock products?

It depends on whether the product is coming back. Temporarily out of stock: keep the page indexed with availability set to OutOfStock. Discontinued with a replacement: 301 to it. Discontinued with nothing similar: keep the page or return 410. Seasonal: never delete.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 179 words 3 sections

The four cases

Situation	Action
Temporarily unavailable	Keep indexed, set OutOfStock, offer alternatives on the page
Discontinued, replacement exists	301 to the replacement — not the category, never the home page
Discontinued, nothing similar	Keep with a clear message, or 410 if there is nothing useful to say
Seasonal	Never delete. It rebuilds authority annually and you cannot buy that back

Why deleting is usually wrong

A product page with links and ranking history is an asset. Deleting it discards that, and the replacement product starts from zero — which is why the redirect matters more than the tidiness.

The markup requirement

Availability in your Product schema must match the page at all times. A page saying "out of stock" with InStock in the markup is the most common cause of a structured-data manual action in retail.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, The e-commerce SEO checklist, in the order the checks actually matter covers it in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.