Though it’s a joke in the SEO community, “it depends” is really the answer when dealing with out-of-stock products on e-commerce websites. There are many situational decisions, with each having trade-offs, when it comes to SEO and user experience. Many content management systems have built-in rules for handling out-of-stock products, but that logic can often be changed. Some setups may have no built-in logic at all. In these cases, you get to make the rules and work with your developers to implement what you want. Let’s look at the different scenarios.
How Should Permanently out of
Stock With permanently out-of-stock products, you know the products are gone and won’t be back. Does that mean you should get rid of the pages? Not necessarily. You have a few executive email list options here. Option 1. Redirect the page If you have a similar product that you want to push people toward, you may want to 301 redirect the old product to the new product. This will also maintain any link value if the pages are similar enough. If the pages are not similar enough or you redirect to a category page or your homepage, then these pages may be treated as a soft 404 and the value from links may not be preserved. If these other locations are where you want users to go, then do the redirect anyway.
It’s possible the links
Will still pass value. Because most websites have removed many products in the past, you may want to see if there are any opportunities to redirect old pages to SV Lists relevant, current pages and reclaim the value from the links. Here’s how to find those opportunities: Paste your domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer (also accessible for free in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools) Go to the Best by links report Use the response code filter and check “404 not found” and “410 gone” I usually sort this by “Referring domains” or “UR” to look for top opportunities.
When redirecting a page, many systems will How Should automatically. Remove internal links from categories, facets, sitemaps, and internal search pages. In some systems, you may need to remove these links manually or there may be additional links from blog pages or elsewhere that you’ll want to remove.
