Been lurking here for about a year, first post.
I manage a small outdoor gear store, around 2,300 products. Our supplier discontinues stuff constantly, so every month maybe 60-80 products go permanently out of stock. Right now the previous guy’s rule was to delete them, which means a pile of 404s every month, and some of those pages had decent backlinks and rankings for model-number searches.
Options I’m weighing:
1. keep the page, mark it discontinued, link to the newer model
2. 301 to the closest replacement product
3. 301 to the category
4. let it 404/410
Temporary out-of-stock I already leave live. It’s the permanent ones I’m unsure about. Option 1 feels best for users but I worry about hundreds of dead product pages piling up over a few years.
What rule do you use, and does it change depending on whether the page had links or traffic?
.
