James, I would still make these as out of stock.

If these products don't get any organic search or traffic anyway, it is ok to re-direct them.

The message above was for established products that have been indexed by Google over a long period of time.

Please le the know if you have any questions. Also, if someone answer the question to your satisfaction you should mark the comment as a good comment

The situation is this. I was featured on a high quality website. Immediately 8 other high quality sites copied the exact article which linked to me.. Now I have these backlinks

Now there is some conflicting beliefs here and I want to know what you think.

If I got a high spam website to remove my backlink, is a disavow through search console still necessary ?

Keep in mind if it helps even in the slightest to improve rankings im for it!

Maureen,

Shannon gave some great suggestions, but I would also recommend using a directory service to make sure that your number is in the same format through all the business directories you are listed with.

In addition to that, I would recommend submitting your number to a service like white pages reverse number look up or true caller.

It is best to have as many people referencing your phone number as possible so the people searching for you can verify that its you.

Funny side note...  If you Google "Call google my business" googles phone number doesn't even show up, but an irrelevant third party companies number does!

I have countless clients that get HUGE traffic form products that they have "discontinued"

You worked so hard to get those products to display on Google, why would you throw away all of your traffic with a 301 redirect to a different product causing high bounce rates or even worse taking your visitors to a discontinued product page.

I would simply put an "Out of Stock" notice on that product and have related products below to direct your customers to similar products or maybe an add to waitlist, so if you decide to bring the product back you have immediate customers.

Amazon is a perfect example. For the most part, they do not delete or remove products. If you search a product that is no longer in stock at Amazon it will say out of stock, still allowing you to see multiple reviews on that product or other sellers offering similar products.