Discontinued products on ecommerce store

[coma99]

Hi,

I have a high number of very-low/zero traffic and zero backlinked product pages that have been discontinued (and wont come back).

For these pages we automatically remove them from our website indexes and also removed internal links and then essentially kept the product pages and their urls intact but just added a note saying "no longer available, how about these..." with alternate similar product options. This seems to be the general consensus online for discontinued product pages that have little value.

The questions is do I either 404 or noindex these now discontinued pages? What are the pros or cons?

Thanks

[seoelevated]

If you are keeping them, rather than redirecting them, I assume that means you have a reason for people to be able to find those pages so that they can get some information abot the discontinued product, or at least understand that it was discontinued. If that's the case, then I don't think you would want to noindex or 404 them. On the other hand, if there is no reason for those pages to still exist, from a visitor standpoint, then usually I would redirect them to a category page (generally the parent category the product belonged to), to preserve any link equity, even if the number of links are low. Especially if you have a lot of discontinued products from a category, even if each product had let's say on average 0.1 links, then if you have 1,000 of those pages you would end up with 10 backlinks to your category page, which could be valuable. Again, this is assuming that you don't want/need to preserve the pages for your users to be able to find the info.

[coma99]

Thanks for the response. Just to further query...

• Do you have any data or insights  from you experience as to whether redirecting a user to a category page (with a message stating why they have been redirected) would be a better/worse user experience than showing the user the product page as is (with a similar message about being discontinued)?

• Also the only thing that concerns me with the 301 approach is that we have potentially 10k products per year being discontinued. Wouldn't the inevitable ten of thousands of 301s cause a performance issue?

Thanks again

[seoelevated]

Th approach of redirecting with an informative message is potentially a good one. I have not implemented nor seen this done. If you go this route, make sure it is a true server redirect, with a 301 response code. But I could see how the redirect could include a query param in the destination URL which could then be used to display a fairly generic message.

As far as better vs. worse, from my perspective that differs depending on the nature of the products. One good use case for keeping the old product page around would be like a consumer electronics product page which contained technical info or resources which would be hard to find otherwise (but an alternative could be to have a support library for that). Another example, when I was on the agency-side, I worked with an apparel brand which each season introduced and retired thematic prints. And they kept a library of retired prints, which visitors could upvote to try to get them returned into service.

You wrote in your OP that these pages are zero/low traffic, with few backlinks. So, I'm inferring that the actual user experience isn't going to be really experienced very much.

But the reason to redirect to the category page, is to preserve any link equity the product page might have built up over time. Again, even if each product has very few backlinks, if you add them all up redirected to a parent category page, that could make a difference in how that category page ranks. If you can accomplish this without confusing real visitors (if any).

To your last point, yes it's possible that the search engine might consider some of these redirects to be "soft 404s". In which case, the link equity wouldn't be preserved because it would be treated like a 404. But, that's exactly what you're proposing to do anyway. So, if even just some of them get treated as 301s, you're ahead of the game, as I see it.

[coma99]

That's really informative, thanks!

I assume when you recommend I redirect discontinued pages to the associated category page you mean redirecting via a 301?

Sorry I probably wasn't very clear on my final point about my concern about having too many 301's. My main concern about building tens of thousands of 301's into my site was that it would potentially have an impact on how quick my pages loaded for users (and crawlbot) since it would have to check through so many 301 rules. Have you experienced this as a reason not to use mass implementation of 301s?

[seoelevated]

Yes, I meant 301, server-side redirects.

Regarding performance, I currently have a little over 50,000 entries in my redirects file with no discernable performance impact. But, different platforms handle differently, and also we have a CDN which caches redirects too, so that could make a difference. I guess the safest approach would be to insert a hundred thousand or more dummy redirect entries into your redirect file, temporarily, and stress test it.