How to handle outdated products/pages?

[bastelele]

Hi,

I wonder how I should handle pages with outdated products. Our market is changing rapidly unfortunately so products we offered in the past are no longer existent.

So for example one of our product was called "PRODUCT 1"

The URL for this product is still:
www.mydomain.com/product-1/

with different subpages about the product like:
www.mydomain.com/product-1/about/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/howto/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/pricing/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/whatever/

Our new product is totally different from the first one.

Is it still a good idea to set up 301 redirects or are there any other ideas?

Thanks in advance
Bastian

[Everett]

Hello Bastian,

With regard to outdated products the best solution I have found is to 301 redirect the old product URL to the closest category page. I prefer this to redirecting to another product page because once the new product is outdated you'll be going through multiple redirects.

Look into updating the old blog posts and making them more relevant for readers today. If you are unable to do that I would just leave them where they are. As they get outdated they should drop in the rankings anyway. Or you could 301 redirect them to a more recent post.

[bastelele]

Hi Kyle,

thanks for your fast answer.

It's really difficult for me where to get started. I have the same problem with old blog posts. Should I keep all the old blog posts even they are not relevant and bad written?

Or is it sometimes a good choice to make a break and build a new website from scratch with just some of the "old" good pages and focus on new relevant content?

Thanks in advance
Bastian

[KyleJack]

Hi Bastian,

You're quite fortunate here in that your URL structure is very simple. When product SKUs, item IDs and search parameters enter the mix it can complicate things further. However, given your clean URLs you should be able to 301 redirect without any problems.

The question is where do you 301 that product URL (and its subfolders)? Maybe a new product has superseded it - that might be a good fit; or maybe you can redirect to a category that contains similar products; or if this product has been discontinued and there are no similar products elsewhere on your site, you could 301 back to the homepage.

Of course, you'll want to ensure that your internal linking is also up to scratch and reflects the changes you want to make. Either remove the internal links to that page or send them elsewhere (preferably the former if the product is no longer in stock).

Happy redirecting.

K