E-Commerce & SEO Question: What do you do about products no longer being sold?

Lori_Osborne
Lori_Osborne Member Posts: 23
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Hello All!

I have a question. How do you all handle 404 pages associated with products no longer being sold on a website? Do you create 301 redirects for every single product? Or do you leave the pages as 404 pages? Or do you set product pages to not index? I worry about the SEO impact of leaving 404 pages as-is and I definitely worry about not indexing product pages.

How do you handle this?

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  • Yonatan_Shaham
    Yonatan_Shaham Member Posts: 2 mod
    Answer ✓

    Hi @Lori_Osborne,

    Good question! I believe the best way to handle this is to customize the 404 page to say the product is no longer available, and link to the store page and/or show a product gallery.

    Are you expecting this to happen rather frequently for your site(s)?

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  • Lori_Osborne
    Lori_Osborne Member Posts: 23

    Unfortunately, I do expect it frequently for one client. She buys limited and seasonal items and has them taken down quite often. I didn't even think about it until I got the Search Engine Console report with the long list of 404 pages.

    I do love the idea of customizing the 404 page! That won't fix the SEO impact with Search Console, but at least it will solve the end user's experience.

    I believe she is contemplating removing the store altogether so that would help with this issue, but this is a good solution in the meantime.

    Thanks!

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