What do you do with Discontinued products?
Tags: webdev, beginners, tutorial
Published: 2020-11-03 11:50:14

First, step back and ask these questions:

- How many URLs are you talking about?
- Are you tracking these URLs on GA?
- Are these URLs driving traffic?
- Is the product likely to come back into stock?
- Are they visible in GSC and are they been indexed?


For out-of-stock products that will be restocked in the future, the simple answer is to keep the page visible. However, from a UX perspective, provide an option to notify the user when the product will be available again.
 
For discontinued products - it's more complicated.
 
Why? It's because you'll likely have inbound links to that URL and for SEO you probably won't want to lose the link equity. However, from a UX/CRO perspective, you may not want to lose customer acquisition if these products are ranking well organically.

You have four options:


1. Redirect them to a relevant product or redirect them to their own category. You could also add a parameter at the end of the redirect UR with ?pd=discontinued that allows you to trigger a message saying something along the lines of “The product you are searching has been discontinued, Please find other available products”. However, if you are adding a parameter for UX then you should make sure the canonical URL points to the main URL without any additional parameters.

With this solution, you could argue that it's not always possible to create redirects for so many links because it needs to be done manually. If it’s done automatically then you may be limited from a technical perspective. 

So, what’s another method you can use?


2. Another solution is to add “noindex, follow” robots tag on all the discontinued products. This will kill any traffic from search, but still “follow” from links signal. This will be a temporary solution if you don’t want the products not to show on search. However, you may want to still redirect these products to a relevant product or its own category after a while. In this situation, you don’t need to add additional paraments for the discontinued message because the user may no longer be searching for that product. It’s also worth investigating the backlinks. 


3. You may want also to keep the page. This is perfect on the rare occasion that the product receives a significant amount of traffic. In this case, it’s worth keeping the page and showing other alternative products or creating blog pages to redirect to.


4. Display 404 page. This is a great option when we know these products don’t receive any traffic and they have no value from backlinks (PR). In which case, leave it displaying a 404 page. However, I recommend designing a comprehensive 404 page with the option to navigate to alternative categories.

If the product is discontinued or out of stock then I recommend demoting the product or not linking from PLP and search listing.
 
When dealing with discontinued products, I firmly believe the most important thing to keep in mind is the synergy between SEO and User Experience.


Hope you find this useful - [Dev Bio](https://dev.to/aminedahimene/), [My Site](https://aminedahimene.com). You can also [buy me a coffee](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/AmineDahimene/).