What are best SEO practices for product pages of unique items when the item is no longer available?

[Darioz]

Hello, my company sells used cars though a website.

Each vehicle page contains photos and details of the unit, but once the vehicle is sold, all the contents are replaced by a simple text like "this vehicle is not available anymore".
Title of the page also change to a generic one.
URL remains the same.

I doubt this is the correct way of doing, but I cannot understand what method would be better.

The improvement I am considering for pages of no longer available vehicles is this:

keep the page  alive but with reduced vehicle details, a text like: this vehicles is not available anymore and automatic recommendations for similar items.

What do you think? Is this a good practice or do you suggest anything different?

Also, should I put a NOINDEX tag on the expired vehicles pages?

Thank you in advance for your help.

[Darioz]

Dear Oznappies, Sheldon, James, thank you very much.

I will try to proceed as follows:

keep the vehicle page with minimum information, indicate that the the item is sold and show links to similar and related vehicles that the customer might find interesting. Also, I'll put NOINDEX tag on the page (I prefer the search engine to send users to pages of items that are available).

Thank you!

[Doc_Sheldon]

I agree with Oznappies' recommendation... tell them "this vehicle has been sold, but we have other similar models". Personally, I would offer them a link to similar models and a Back link, as some people will take exception to being led to a different car than the one they wanted to see. I would definitely not get rid of the old content, however. I would simply do a noindex follow.

[oznappies]

If you only show the car image they were originally looking for and also the current ones available in 'mustang' then that would work for cross or upselling the customer. It could also give them the idea to get in quick if they like a particular vehicle, before it sells to. You could get fancy and track the click throughs on a give vehicle and show a heat map of level of interest, but that only works if you get reasonable interest on most vehicles.

[TellThemEverything]

Personally I'd keep all the old pages, and on them show a list of similar cars.. so if it was a Mustang, show other mustangs, etc.

[Darioz]

Thank you, that's a good idea. So do you advise against keeping old vehicle pages available?

[oznappies]

It does depend on if you have similar cars to sell. If so you could create a page with links to other vehicles that a buyer may be interested in and then add a 301 redirect to the new page. Depending on what your site developers are using, they could include an optional heading to specify that 'car xyz is no longer available, but we have many others' where xyz is determined from the refering page. This would give the new page where you have similar vehicle SEO juice and keep your customers infromed of what is in stock.