Links On Out Of Stock Product Pages Causing 404

[znotes]

Hi Moz Community!

We're doing an audit of our e-commerce site at the moment and have noticed a lot of 404 errors coming from out of stock/discontinued product pages that we've kept 200 in the past. We kept these and added links on them for categories or products that are similar to the discontinued items but many other links of the page like images, blog posts, and even breadcrumbs have broken or are no longer valid causing lots of additional 404s.

If the product has been discontinued for a long time and gets no traffic and has no link equity would you recommend adding a noindex robots tag on these pages so we're not wasting time fixing all the broken links on these?

Any thoughts?Thanks

[anthonydnelson]

• No traffic and no link equity = let it 404 or give it a 410
• If there is any equity (traffic/links) 301 redirect it to a related product or the category/subcategory page

[znotes]

Hi Anthony,

Thanks for your reply, we have a very high turn over rate for products and many items go out of stock frequently. Would you recommend just noindexing the out of stock pages that don't have any traffic or links and are very old so they don't waste crawl budget? Normally it takes a while for Google to take 404 or 410 pages out of their index especially if the pages are old and don't get crawled very often.

Thanks

Zack

[anthonydnelson]

Hi Zack,

• If you want the products to still be accessible/visible on the site, you could leave the pages as 200 with a NoIndex tag.
• If you want the products gone from the site and from Google's index, you could go the 301, 404, 410 route.

Considering there are multiple decent options available, consider going with the one that will be easy for your team to implement and maintain over time.

[znotes]

Hi Anthony,

Thanks for that response, that makes a lot of sense.

Best,

Zack