Out-of-stock handling
How a site treats product pages when items are temporarily unavailable — keeping them live with accurate availability rather than removing…
EcommerceEnd-of-life products
Discontinued product handling
The policy for permanently retired products: keep as an archive page, redirect to a genuine successor, or return 404/410 — chosen by whether an equivalent exists.
In full
Redirecting to a successor product is right when one genuinely replaces it; redirecting everything to the category is a soft 404 pattern. Where a product has accumulated links and search demand — discontinued models people still research — keeping an informative archive page with specifications and successor links preserves the value. Where nothing equivalent exists and no demand remains, 410 is the cleanest signal.
Example
A discontinued camera keeps its page with a 'replaced by' link and full specifications, retaining its review links and long-tail traffic.
Related terms
HTTP status codes
Numeric codes in an HTTP response that tell crawlers how to treat a URL: 200 index it, 3xx follow the redirect, 404/410 drop it, 5xx come…
301 redirect
A server-side permanent redirect that tells crawlers a URL has moved for good and that ranking signals should consolidate on the…
Soft 404
A URL that returns HTTP 200 while displaying content that means 'not found' or has no real content, causing search engines to treat it as…
Content pruning
Systematically removing, merging or noindexing low-value pages so a site's indexed footprint reflects only content worth ranking.