How to deal with deleting items

Stop!

Don't delete anything yet... use "direct only" for the product visibility instead.

[Update: Zazzle recently introduced the ability to hide complete categories. Note that this doesn't hide the products contained in them - they can still be found by a search in Zazzle, and so it isn't an alternative solution to what is described below.]

Think about it... anything you've created (as long as it wasn't seconds ago) may have been viewed by potential customers. And once that's happened, anything may have happened... they may have bookmarked it, tweeted it, said something about it on Facebook, their blog etc.

And, of course, search engines may have indexed it.

So why would you want to lose those benefits? - all that link juice and the potential future visitors through them?

Do I? Don't I?

Here are my attitudes that go into the decision-making mix:

• Even if I don't like a design, someone else might.
• Stuff I did a long time ago when I was new to Zazzle isn't really "up to scratch" and I don't want my Store to show those now.
• I want to retain their link juice goodness if I can.
• If someone has linked to it via Squidoo, Facebook etc, I don't want to mess up their efforts and cause their link to be broken

Hmmm... well, setting the product visibility to "direct only" deals with all of the above.

With it set that way, it won't show up in-store to visitors (or search engines - unless they already know about it) or in the Zazzle market place. If someone already knows the link though, it's still there and will still work.

That's cool :-) so I don't need to delete any of those.

Delete only if a design is broken...

And that leaves only the "broken" designs. By these I mean, for example, where my inexperience meant I forgot to make something a template object and I found out about it only later.

Or maybe where the template text doesn't work very well and it ends up looking ugly when someone enters, say, a longer name than I allowed for.

In these cases, even if the search engines have indexed it, I don't want potential customers to have such a bad experience and so I do delete these.

Finally

Just for good measure, I've created a "staff-only" category to hold items marked as "direct only". From there I can easily monitor any views. Eventually, just to be tidy, after a year or two I may delete those whose views remain at or near zero.

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So Happy Zazzling and KEEP THAT LINK JUICE GOODNESS !