Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Using NoIndex Tag instead of 410 Gone Code on Discontinued products?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Unsolved Using NoIndex Tag instead of 410 Gone Code on Discontinued products?

    Technical SEO
    ecommerce noindex shopify indexed urls
    2
    3
    1243
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • BakeryTech
      BakeryTech Subscriber last edited by

      Hello everyone, I am very new to SEO and I wanted to get some input & second opinions on a workaround I am planning to implement on our Shopify store. Any suggestions, thoughts, or insight you have are welcome & appreciated!

      For those who aren't aware, Shopify as a platform doesn't allow us to send a 410 Gone Code/Error under any circumstance. When you delete or archive a product/page, it becomes unavailable on the storefront. Unfortunately, the only thing Shopify natively allows me to do is set up a 301 redirect. So when we are forced to discontinue a product, customers currently get a 404 error when trying to go to that old URL.

      My planned workaround is to automatically detect when a product has been discontinued and add the NoIndex meta tag to the product page. The product page will stay up but be unavailable for purchase. I am also adjusting the LD+JSON to list the products availability as Discontinued instead of InStock/OutOfStock.
      Then I let the page sit for a few months so that crawlers have a chance to recrawl and remove the page from their indexes. I think that is how that works?
      Once 3 or 6 months have passed, I plan on archiving the product followed by setting up a 301 redirect pointing to our internal search results page. The redirect will send the to search with a query aimed towards similar products. That should prevent people with open tabs, bookmarks and direct links to that page from receiving a 404 error.

      I do have Google Search Console setup and integrated with our site, but manually telling google to remove a page obviously only impacts their index.

      Will this work the way I think it will?
      Will search engines remove the page from their indexes if I add the NoIndex meta tag after they have already been index?
      Is there a better way I should implement this?

      P.S. For those wondering why I am not disallowing the page URL to the Robots.txt, Shopify won't allow me to call collection or product data from within the template that assembles the Robots.txt. So I can't automatically add product URLs to the list.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • BakeryTech
        BakeryTech Subscriber @maribailey10 last edited by

        @maribailey10 If I could I would, but we very rarely have products similar enough to the discontinued one for that approach to make sense. Hence why I plan on sending them to a search query page.

        Occasionally, we are able to immediately replace a discontinued product with a replacement, but that rarely happens.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • maribailey10
          maribailey10 last edited by

          No just try to interlink them to other similar product and edit content accordingly

          BakeryTech 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • 1 / 1
          • First post
            Last post

          Got a burning SEO question?

          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


          Start my free trial


          Browse Questions

          Explore more categories

          • Moz Tools

            Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

          • SEO Tactics

            Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

          • Community

            Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

          • Digital Marketing

            Chat about tactics outside of SEO

          • Research & Trends

            Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

          • Support

            Connect on product support and feature requests.

          • See all categories

          Related Questions

          • digitalenginehub

            How to Increase Website Visibility on Google and Bing?

            ranking ecommerce

            I am working on an e-commerce niche website and I aim to rank higher on Google to drive more traffic to my website. Any suggestions?

            Link Building | | digitalenginehub
            0
          • williamhuynh

            Shopify SEO - Double Filter Pages

            shopify seo audit seo expert

            Hi Experts, Single filter page: /collections/dining-chairs/black
            -- currently, canonical the same: /collections/dining-chairs/black
            -- currently, index, follow Double filter page: /collections/dining-chairs/black+fabric
            -- currently, canonical the same: /collections/dining-chairs/black+fabric
            -- currently, noindex, follow My question is about double filter page above:
            if noindexing is the better option OR should I change the canonical to /collections/dining-chairs/black Thank you

            Technical SEO | | williamhuynh
            0
          • fbcosta

            How to index e-commerce marketplace product pages

            technical seo ecommerce indexation crawl product page

            Hello! We are an online marketplace that submitted our sitemap through Google Search Console 2 weeks ago. Although the sitemap has been submitted successfully, out of ~10000 links (we have ~10000 product pages), we only have 25 that have been indexed. I've attached images of the reasons given for not indexing the platform. gsc-dashboard-1 gsc-dashboard-2 How would we go about fixing this?

            Technical SEO | | fbcosta
            0
          • Tom3_15

            Dynamically Inserting Noindex With Javascript

            Hello, I have a broken plugin creating hundreds of WP-Content directory pages being indexed by Google. I can not access the source code of these pages to add a noindex to them. The page URL's all have the plugin name within them.  In order to resolve the issue, I wrote a solution with javascript to dynamically add in a noindex tag to any URL containing the plugin name. Would this noindex be respected by Google and is there a way to immediately check that it is respected? Currently, I can not delete the plugin due to issues with it's php. If you would like to view the code: https://codepen.io/trodrick/pen/Gwwaej?editors=0010 Thanks!

            Technical SEO | | Tom3_15
            0
          • Ham1979

            Reviews on Product Page or Separated

            Good Afternoon We currently have our individual product information pages set-up with a link through to a separate review page optimised for the term "Product A Reviews" I was reading about structured data and if I read correctly, the reviews should sit with the marked up product data so I was wondering whether to merge them back into one page. We have many reviews so the review pages are paginated in blocks of 25 My options are: Leave as it is, product info page and separate review page Merge the review content back in to the main page and have the pagination work on that page Include the first 25 reviews on the product info page then when user clicks through to page 2, 3 etc they're taken to the separated review page. In that way the product page would regularly get new content and we can still have a page specifically targeted for reviews. From the users point of view, they probably aren't even aware they're being taken to a separate reviews page so with that in mind as I'm typing this maybe they should be one page again

            Technical SEO | | Ham1979
            0
          • Kelly_S

            How do I handle duplicate content of the same product in Multiple product categories?

            I am building a BigCommerce store for selling framed art.  Many of the pieces of art will fall in more than one product category. Let's say I have a framed print of a photograph of a western landscape.  This piece of art would fit into these categories;  "western", "landscape", and "photography".   I would have three pages with duplicate content for just this one framed print. Will google give me less page rank due to this?  Can all the link juice be given to just one of the three categories by use of rel=canonical?  If so, does anyone know how to do this for a bigcommerce site? I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks, Kelly

            Technical SEO | | Kelly_S
            0
          • Alick300

            Two websites with similar products

            I have two websites with similar products with different tld.I have a keywords that is comman in both.One site is at top in google with that keyword and one is not.Can we implement 301 redirect from one domain to another domain for that keyword or google will consider it spammy?Please help me out.

            Technical SEO | | Alick300
            0
          • pauledwards

            How many strong tags is too many

            Hi everyone, just a quick question, what are your views on the use of strong tags in content? how many is too many? What is you have strong tags around every keywords for a sentance etc?

            Technical SEO | | pauledwards
            1

          Get started with Moz Pro!

          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

          Start my free trial
          Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz API
          • Moz Data
          • STAT
          • Product Updates
          Moz Solutions
          • SMB Solutions
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Authority Checker
          • Link Explorer
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • Brand Authority Checker
          • Local Citation Checker
          • MozBar Extension
          • MozCast
          Resources
          • Blog
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Help Hub
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • How-to Guides
          • Moz Academy
          • API Docs
          About Moz
          • About
          • Team
          • Careers
          • Contact
          Why Moz
          • Case Studies
          • Testimonials
          Get Involved
          • Become an Affiliate
          • MozCon
          • Webinars
          • Practical Marketer Series
          • MozPod
          Connect with us

          Contact the Help team

          Join our newsletter
          Moz logo
          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
          • Accessibility
          • Terms of Use
          • Privacy

          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.