Best way to handle redirection for products that come in and out of inventory.

[CC_Dallas]

We have a large volume of products that rotate seasonally. From an SEO perspective we are looking for the best method on how to handle these issues.

Currently when crawler or user encounters a URL to a product that is no longer in inventory we are looking at two things. One, the request comes in and send a 200 to a page that says ITEM NOT FOUND. Option 2, is simply send them to a 404.

The product may or may not be put back into production. What is the best method to handle this?

[RobMay]

You definately don't want to use a 404 error code, so avoid that at. There would be a lot of 301 redirects after that as Google isn't a big fan of 404 pages and it doesn't help your 'user experience'.

Because your product pages (individually) might be gaining links and resources/mentions/social mentions, etc, from customers as they find products, a 404 would produce a loss in valuable inbound linking juice into the domain.

I would simply keep those pages live at all times, but build on the pages/products description, history, talk about it's features, etc, keep those deeply seeded and index'd pages in the domain. Then when they come back online (if they do) ir provides users excellent content about the product and in parallel works with thier user experience.

If the product after time doesn't return, then just work to find a solution for those specific pages. Perhaps a directory of 'out of date products' that visitors could reference if they were looking or searching for something in particur on that site - and offer an alternative (if available) to them in it's place?

Hope this helps a little. Rob

[BTeubner]

Really depends on the products you're selling. I do like Rob's answer about keeping the page live and offering an alternative or capturing an interest list. You still want the sale or to create the lead so providing some sort of call to action is key if these are significant.

If the product is never coming back, I'd def redirect to a close match or a parent category.

[EGOL]

I would simply keep those pages live at all times

I keep seasonal pages up... and have found that they creep up the rankings over the years. Next season they are more valuable.

[RobMay]

I agree here, but with the Panda updates this past year, just having pages up won't really do much. You'll need to improve the user experience to build on the page.

I would build on the page, but look to improve the landing pages of the products that are either no longer available, or the pages that are or will still be online but with products that are not available 'at this time'.

Bring in social media, product landing pages, perhaps a posting 'comment' section for customers to review the products (to offer some user generated content), alongside other features like customized descriptions (don't copy the supplier site), features about the history of the product, the origin of it.. etc..

If it's no longer available, redirecting to a products page of similar relation will help keep the client on the site - while also offering various products of similar needs for their use.

Do all this - I and I see a win-win for you

[RobMay]

It really does depend on the product and type of site for sure.

[CC_Dallas]

Thank you Rob for taking the time to answer. Much appreciated. That's pretty much the direction we started with. I kind of look at it like an internal search. When an internal search is made for a product that doesn't exist, they get returned to a 200 and static item not found page. So we are moving forward this same method.

Our next step is to reduce 8k 404s a week we get!