What is the best practice to SEO discontinued products?

[Kidz Gifts]

What to do with discontinued product pages? What is the best practice to manage this pages and protect your website’s SEO? Leave it, delete it or redirect it?

Any advice and suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

 

[StephenSumner]

It depends on the quantities of discontinued products you are dealing with through the year as to what approach would be best. You have a few options... 301 redirect if they are gone permanently, leave as is, 410. 410 might be best if there was a lot as having loads of internal 301's is not great.

 

[Kidz Gifts]

It depends on the quantities of discontinued products you are dealing with through the year as to what approach would be best. You have a few options... 301 redirect if they are gone permanently, leave as is, 410. 410 might be best if there was a lot as having loads of internal 301's is not great.

Thanks for you comment Stephen.

Every month we have around 10 - 20 discontinued products.

 

[UKSBD]

If you know it's going to happen a lot, use neutral URLs and recycle them

 

[Kidz Gifts]

If you know it's going to happen a lot, use neutral URLs and recycle them

Thanks for your advice!

 

[Mollie Rhodes]

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this problem. Different retailers take a variety of approaches, and ultimately, any strategy should be confirmed by testing and user feedback. eBay, for example, keeps all old product pages live on its site. Amazon, on the other hand, will usually remove discontinued product pages after a certain period.

Here are some basic principles you can follow:

• It is good practice to keep discontinued product pages on your site and offer similar suggestions. When popularity is still high (determined by search volume) allow Google to crawl and index pages.
  
  
• When search interest tapers off, but there is still on-site interest, noindex the pages but keep them on your site while offering similar product suggestions.
  
  
• When interest becomes nonexistent, redirect the pages to a general “product unavailable” page. This will ensure that you don’t lose any links.
  

 

[Sophie Leonard]

I think if you are getting huge traffic on discontinued products pages then I would recommend putting an "Out of Stock" notice on that product and have related products below to direct your customers to similar products or maybe an add to waitlist, so in future, if you decide to bring the product back you have immediate customers.

Amazon is a perfect example. For most of the products, they do not delete or remove discontinued products. If you search for a product that is no longer in stock, Amazon will say “out of stock”, and would allow you to see multiple reviews on that product and would offer similar products by other sellers.

 

[Kidz Gifts]

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this problem. Different retailers take a variety of approaches, and ultimately, any strategy should be confirmed by testing and user feedback. eBay, for example, keeps all old product pages live on its site. Amazon, on the other hand, will usually remove discontinued product pages after a certain period.

Here are some basic principles you can follow:

• It is good practice to keep discontinued product pages on your site and offer similar suggestions. When popularity is still high (determined by search volume) allow Google to crawl and index pages.
  
  
• When search interest tapers off, but there is still on-site interest, noindex the pages but keep them on your site while offering similar product suggestions.
  
  
• When interest becomes nonexistent, redirect the pages to a general “product unavailable” page. This will ensure that you don’t lose any links.

Thanks Mollie for the reply and for your advice.

 

[Kidz Gifts]

I think if you are getting huge traffic on discontinued products pages then I would recommend putting an "Out of Stock" notice on that product and have related products below to direct your customers to similar products or maybe an add to waitlist, so in future, if you decide to bring the product back you have immediate customers.

Amazon is a perfect example. For most of the products, they do not delete or remove discontinued products. If you search for a product that is no longer in stock, Amazon will say “out of stock”, and would allow you to see multiple reviews on that product and would offer similar products by other sellers.

Thanks Sophie for the reply and your advice. Yes, I've noticed this on Amazon that a lot of items are out of stock and they do not delete them.