Google's John Mueller was asked if stock levels can impact the ranking of products on an e-commerce site. John implied that the answer is no, he said "that seems unrelated, at least for normal search. It might impact product search but he is not sure if it will or won't - but normal web search, it should not impact.
Here is where this was said on Twitter:
That seems unrelated, at least for normal search. I don't know how product search / Google shopping handles that though.
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 4, 2022
John added it doesn't make sense to do this:
That doesn't make much sense in terms of search though.
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 5, 2022
What difference does it make if you have 1 or 100 on stock? Or if you have green widgets out-of-stock, while someone is searching for blue widgets? I can't imagine how search engines (or even humans :)) would want to use that for ranking.
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 5, 2022
If the product you're searching for is available, what does it matter if 90% of the catalog is out of stock? If you're looking for a math textbook, what does it matter if all fiction books are out of stock? It feels similar to the old "404 pages are bad", which is also wrong.
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 5, 2022
Yeah, I think that's a big difference. Also, if other products are out of stock, that wouldn't influence how you search for a product that is in stock. Nuances matter, Twitter sometimes loses them.
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 6, 2022
What concerns me is that the product is listed as out of stock for "about 3 weeks," the SEO said. Now the product dropped from the number one position to the number nine position.
I am thinking, maybe Google is picking up on the out of stock as maybe an error page and treating it as a soft 404 but in that case, the page would not be listed at all? We do also know that Google, via structured data or other means, can show inventory levels in the snippet in some cases. Again, John is saying out of stock products should not see a drop in rankings? We know Google may soft 404 out of stock products over time.
I did ask about the soft 404 for that URL but he does not know:
I haven't checked it, I just had an alert set up and it rang. Was the first thing that popped into my head because key word #2 dropped 6 places yesterday and keyword #1 dropped today so was the first thing that I guessed at.
— Mckeinze97 (@mckeinze1997) January 4, 2022
What do you think?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
