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That's really informative, thanks!

I assume when you recommend I redirect discontinued pages to the associated category page you mean redirecting via a 301?

Sorry I probably wasn't very clear on my final point about my concern about having too many 301's. My main concern about building tens of thousands of 301's into my site was that it would potentially have an impact on how quick my pages loaded for users (and crawlbot) since it would have to check through so many 301 rules. Have you experienced this as a reason not to use mass implementation of 301s?

Thanks for the response. Just to further query...

• Do you have any data or insights  from you experience as to whether redirecting a user to a category page (with a message stating why they have been redirected) would be a better/worse user experience than showing the user the product page as is (with a similar message about being discontinued)?

• Also the only thing that concerns me with the 301 approach is that we have potentially 10k products per year being discontinued. Wouldn't the inevitable ten of thousands of 301s cause a performance issue?

Thanks again

Hi,

I have a high number of very-low/zero traffic and zero backlinked product pages that have been discontinued (and wont come back).

For these pages we automatically remove them from our website indexes and also removed internal links and then essentially kept the product pages and their urls intact but just added a note saying "no longer available, how about these..." with alternate similar product options. This seems to be the general consensus online for discontinued product pages that have little value.

The questions is do I either 404 or noindex these now discontinued pages? What are the pros or cons?

Thanks

Hi,

Background

I have an international site with 32 country homepages within the same domain: eg

www.domain.com/en-gb/
www.domain.com/fr-fr/
www.domain.com/de-de/
www.domain.com/es-es/ and so forth

We use IP redirection on the root www.domain.com (which has no HTML page of its own) to divert the user to their relevant country homepage.

Within each country homepage we include:

(a canonical link to itself)

... (hreflang alternates to all instances of other homepages including itself )

Our Google Crawl bot is located in Germany and so when it crawls our root www.domain.com it takes the title and description from its destination url which in crawlbots case is www.domain.com/de-de/ because of the IP redirect.

What is the problem I am trying to solve?

Every variation of local Google results (eg UK/FR/IT/US) displays at the top the crawled root www.domain.com page with German title/description. How can I stop this happening? Surely adding appropriate hrefs and canonicals to every homepage instance is sufficient for Google to display to you your relevant country homepage variant instead!?

Thanks