Discontinued Product on a Ecommerce site

[dianeb152]

To create a better customer experience, rather then remove discontinued product from a site, we remove many links from the page, and remove it from the navigation of the site, but we keep the url and show that the product can no longer be purchased. This keeps the links, keeps the content, and gives customers the opportunity to find other products we have. But I often wonder if we should allow this items to just 404 and be done with them. Here is an example. http://www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-dyn-bm5a-list. Any advice?

[dianeb152]

Thanks all, I'm glad 75% of you agree with my method. Thanks for the input!

[Toddfoster]

Great advice from Massimilano and Monica - always consider customer experience in the equation as a major factor alongside your on-page ranking factors.

Avoid the 404's and retain the traffic by suggesting alternatives that are relevant to their original query and you won't go far wrong.

Cheers and best of luck moving forward!

[MonicaOConnor]

I couldn't agree with Massimilano more. That page still has value because it can potentially bring traffic to alternative products. I am not a fan of redirecting or 404ing a page that still brings traffic. And as a consumer I don't want to automatically be redirected to what I am not looking for. If I were chances are I would leave the site.

I would definitely add the page back to the navigation and make sure you don't remove anymore links. Then I would state the product is discontinued and add links to similar products. Here is an example of a page that I did on my site.

[max.favilli]

I think showing information about the product, making clear the product can no longer be purchased and encouraging the visitor to buy alternatives is the right thing to do.

404 is out of question, it means you are removing it from SERP, why do that? You want to have as much pages in SERP as possible.

Think about those visitors, they got on that page looking specifically for that product. If you redirect/301 them to something else, you do not serve them the information they were looking for, and you may redirect them to content they are not interested into.

The only case where I would do a 301 is if the discontinued product page has tons of backlink and a terrific page authority, in other words an incredible amount of page juice to transfer.

Checking the example you linked, that page has PA 1 and zero backlinks, so there's no advantage in doing a 301.

One final notice, I am not an expert of music supply but I think you can do a much much better job at suggesting alternatives, if I look at that page I can't see any alternative product, I would suggest alternatives prominently on top of the page with a short reference+link where you state the product is no longer available, or something like that.

[Keszi]

Hi,

I personally would create a 301 redirect to the closest relevant page (for example their category), and if the website has a blog, I would create a new entry telling my customers that unfortunately we have discontinued Product X.

This way I'd keep the link juice gathered by that specific product page, and distribute it towards a relevant page.

Gr., Keszi