Ecommerce site product link. How to handle a link that doesn't exist.

[MindlessWizard]

Suppose we have this product A, and we just have a single item for this. When the item is sold out we do not want to show it  on the website saying "out of stock". Instead we would like to remove the product from out store which will now result in a url that doesn't exist.

And google webmaster tool and Moz analytic will  show them as page not found after they crawl over the site. Should i be generating a new sitemap.xml and update ?

How do i handle those pages that don't exist anymore ?

Thanks

[donford]

Hi,

So you have a few options.

1. Create a non-product page that list similar items and an no-longer available. This gives the users a notice they arrived at the right page but were too late. Along with actionable options it may convert into sales of similar items.

2. 301 the url to the parent category, this is a flat out redirect and maybe the easiest to setup but I don't like the user experience it provides, it does give the benefit of passing the link juice back to the parent.

3. Meta Tag NoIndex this is a pretty much a search engine only fix, it doesn't pass the link juice anywhere but prevents errors from getting to search engines and crawlers.

You can read more about my thoughts and some other opinions on a similar question posted last week here:

I hope this helps and good luck,

Don