Out-of-stock and discontinued products: what to do with the page for SEO
Keep the page, 301 redirect it or return a 404? How to decide for temporarily sold-out and discontinued products, and what to set in structured data and Merchant Center.
Vasile Dingă
.comparison-cards { display: flex; flex-direction: column; gap: 1.5rem; } .comparison-card { background: #fff; border-radius: 16px; padding: 20px; border: 2px solid #efefef; } .comparison-header { display: flex; justify-content: space-between; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 12px; } .comparison-row { display: flex; justify-content: space-between; padding: 8px 0; border-top: 1px solid #efefef; font-size: 14px; color: #1f2937; } .comparison-label { font-size: 14px; width: 30%; } .comparison-value { width: 65%; text-align: right; } @media (max-width: 600px) { .comparison-row { flex-direction: column; align-items: flex-start; } .comparison-value { text-align: left; margin-top: 4px; } } After Black Friday and before Christmas, many stores are left with dozens of sold-out products. Some come back in January, others are no longer made at all. The usual reflex is to delete the products, redirect everything to the homepage or add noindex "until they're back". Each of these reflexes can cost organic traffic you built over months or years. Below I show how to decide, page by page, what to do: keep, redirect or let the page go, plus what to change in structured data and Merchant Center. 1. The first question: will the product come back? The whole decision starts here. A temporarily sold-out product and a product removed from the catalogue for good are two different situations, with almost opposite solutions: Temporarily sold out: you're waiting for stock from the supplier, it's seasonal or it will be reissued. The page stays. Discontinued: the supplier retired it, replaced it with a new model or you no longer stock it. The page is redirected, becomes an archive page or goes away. If you don't know yet, treat it as temporarily sold out and put a date in your calendar, for example in two or three months, when you decide for good. A kept page can be reactivated in a minute; a deleted one has to earn its rankings from scratch. 2. Temporarily sold out: keep the page In its guide…