Out-of-Stock and Discontinued Product Pages: What to Do

Out-of-stock and discontinued product pages are product URLs for items a store cannot currently sell, or will not sell again. How you treat them decides whether the page keeps its search value, sends shoppers somewhere useful, or turns into an error that search engines have to untangle. There are four options: keep the page, redirect it, return a 404 or 410, or hide it from the catalogue while leaving it reachable.

The right option depends on one question: will the product come back, and if not, is there something close that a shopper would want instead? This guide sets out a decision order, what to show on the page in each case, and what to do about the schema, the feed and the internal links.

The advice here reflects how search engines treat pages in general and my judgment on stores I have worked on. Where a point is a judgment call, I say so.

The Decision Order for Unavailable Products

Work through these questions for each product, or for each group of similar products. The first answer that applies decides the treatment.

The order matters. A 404 is the last option, not the first, because a page that still earns visits or links can usually do something useful for a shopper.

Temporarily Out of Stock: Keep the Page

If the product will be back, keep the URL live with a 200 status, keep it indexable and keep its content. The page has history, links and a shopper who may return, and removing it or redirecting it throws that away.

Make the status obvious. Show that the item is out of stock, say when it is expected if you know, and offer a way to be told when it returns. Add links to similar products and to the parent category so the visit does not end on a dead end.

Do not leave the buy button looking available. A shopper who cannot buy and cannot tell why will leave, and a page that promises availability the store cannot deliver also creates a mismatch with your structured data and product feed.

Discontinued Products: Redirect, Keep or Remove

A discontinued product is gone for good, so the choices change. This table sets out what I would do in each situation.

The mistake I see most often is redirecting every removed product to the home page. Google documents that redirecting removed pages to an unrelated page can be treated as a soft 404, and it does not help the shopper either. A redirect should go somewhere that matches what the old page was about.

404, 410 and the Soft 404 Trap

A 404 means the page was not found. A 410 means it is gone and was removed on purpose. For most stores the difference is small, and Google has indicated that it handles the two in a similar way. Use whichever your platform makes easy to set.

The thing to avoid is a soft 404. That is a page that shows “this product is no longer available” but returns a normal 200 status, so search engines see a live page with almost no content. If the page is gone, return a real error status or redirect to something relevant.

Also check the custom 404 page on your platform. A helpful 404 page should link to the main categories and offer search, and it must return a 404 status, not 200.

What to Show on an Unavailable Product Page

The page should help a shopper who arrives from search, a link or a bookmark. These elements do the job.

Keep the product description, specifications and images in place. The page remains a useful reference, and removing the content turns it into the thin page you were trying to avoid.

Schema, Feeds and Internal Links

Structured data and feeds should tell the same story as the page. In schema.org, the availability property has values such as InStock, OutOfStock, PreOrder and Discontinued, and the one you output should match what the page shows. If a Google Merchant Center feed is in use, its availability should agree as well, because a mismatch between the feed and the page can lead to product disapprovals.

For internal links, keep unavailable products out of prominent positions such as the top of a category, unless they are the best match for the shopper. Many platforms let you show out-of-stock items at the end of the list or hide them from the catalogue while keeping the URL reachable. Check that the option you choose does not also remove the page from your sitemap while it is still live.

The sitemap should list only live, indexable pages. Remove products you have redirected or removed so search engines are not asked to crawl URLs that return redirects or errors.

Platform Notes: Shopify and WooCommerce

On Shopify, a product set to draft or archived is no longer available at its URL, so removing it effectively returns a not-found page. Add a redirect in the admin if a replacement exists. A product that is out of stock but still active stays live, and the “continue selling when out of stock” setting controls whether it can be ordered.

On WooCommerce, a product marked out of stock stays live. There is a setting in the inventory options to hide out-of-stock items from the catalogue, which removes them from listings without necessarily removing the product page, so check what happens at the product URL. A product moved to the trash stops being available at its URL, and you would add a redirect with a plugin or server rule.

Platforms change these behaviours, so test one product of each type before applying a rule across the catalogue.

Frequently Asked Questions

Out-of-Stock and Discontinued Page Checklist

For the wider product page picture, read the guide on product page SEO for large catalogues, which covers dead stock as part of catalogue management.

Written by

Abdullah Mahmud

I work on product pages and catalogues for online stores. This guide gives the decision order I would use for out-of-stock and discontinued products, and says where a point is judgment.

Ecommerce SEOProduct pagesRedirectsStructured dataCatalogue management

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