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Ecom best practice for discontinued products?
For a site with thousands of products what’s the best method for dealing with discontinued products?
301 to in stock relevant product?
301 to parent category page?
Will having thousands of redirects be problematic? Thanks!
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1 Reply
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A well optimised 404 page not found is the best for managing with code 410.
Alternatively you can leave the page up, add ‘out of stock’ and a conversion form to capture email for marketing purposes.
Having 1000s of redirects is problematic and will also be dependent on the type of redirect you use and even the type of server that is hosting the site.
.htacess is the most common method but with e-commerce you will make a real mess easy and from memory google can’t crawl massive .htacess effciently.
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For the discontinued products, is there a new model/version of that product or is there a similar product that isn’t discontinued? Or is there helpful guides or information about the product that people would still be searching for?
What is the search volume for the products that are discontinued?
If you have similar or newer products and there is decent volume still I would keep the URL active but change the content on the page to say that this product is no longer available with a CTA pointing them to the newer or similar product. That way you will appear in the SERPs for multiple intents – service/support of the old product and transactional for those that want to purchase.
I tried to find an example at [REI.com](https://REI.com) because they do this, and it was something I did at my last job and we saw decent conversion on new devices from traffic that landed on the discontinued device URL.
In terms of how long do you keep them, I would watch the traffic and volume. Once it gets low and/or you are no longer driving traffic/conversion then I would redirect to the relevant category page – if possible filtered to that brand.
And to your last question, no there is no harm in having redirects – though after time if you discontinue the full category then you have to go back and update all of those redirects to a new destination.
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