Removing Out of Stock Items from an E-Commerce website

[13375auc3]

I have a dilemma.

We have over 500 out of stock items that are still listed on our ecommerce website. I'm thinking it would be a good idea to leave them up because they are all considered content by google, and the keywords might drive traffic.

On the other hand, the customers might be disappointed if the items are out of stock (we don't restock our sold out items), and many times, they will not lead to a conversion if the customer is looking for something very specific.

Considering all these factors (and some unmentioned ones), my main question is: If I remove content, does that make all of the other content on our website stronger by having more pagerank and link juice flow to them, or do I hurt our rankings?

[Alex-Harford]

If you have more pages that all contain links to the same pages (e.g. category pages) then more link juice will be flowing to those category pages. I wouldn't just remove the content, at least 301 redirect the old products to a category page, or a newer version of that product if appropriate - include a message on the new page explaining that the product they searched for is out of stock, but we suggest this/these alternative(s), or something like that. If you don't want to 301 them, you could just have links on the out of stock pages to new item or category pages.