Short lifetime products

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Tony “Tiggerito” McCreath: Many eCommerce website have products that come and go.
  
  This is more significant if they sell second hand products that have a short lifetime value and get replaced with similar products.
  
  Other stores have products that go out of stock for periods, then return.
  
  What's the current best advice for dealing with this churn?
• 
  Ryan Cramer: Adding a "Others viewed these items" section (especially on a sold out item) can overcome this issue... without maintaining a 301 list or increased bounce because of an "out of stock" item. For eCommerce, this helps with cross sells as well as keeping visitors on your website for more SEO value
  
• 
  Tony “Tiggerito” McCreath: +Ryan Cramer ;I like that. Most eCommerce CMSs retain info on related products, so could provide a placeholder page that explained that the product is not available and pointed people to the similar products.
  
  Maybe the trick is to keep the out of stock pages like that. For products that have gone forever, maybe also add a canonical to the category page, so that the search engines are pushed there. And actually skip using 301s!
• 
  Ryan Cramer: I don't know about you, +Tony McCreath ; but maintaining the 301s and canonicals on "out of stock" pages can be a pain... plus you loose that SEO content! Setting up with relative content is a win-win-win... personally, I write my own CMSs to get all the options that work, without the overhead and restrictions that don't, so I dont know if your CMS would be able to do this
• 
  Dave Elliott: we tend to have a script that 302s any out of stock page to its parent category.
• 
  Tony “Tiggerito” McCreath: +Dave Elliott ;That's a good idea. Automated and the 302 means it should re-index quickly.
  
  I may even be able to do something similar in closed CMSs.
• 
  Suraj Gadage: +Tony McCreath ;I handle fairly large eCommerce website and I usually face two types of situations here.
  
  1. Seasonal/Special Products
  The types of products are available for a certain period of time and won't be added back into the stock. In such cases, we add unavailable meta tag on the product pages to tell Google that a page should expire from the search results at a specific time. And if someone tries to access the page directly or refer to this page, then we redirect them to a custom 404 page showing similar offers/promotions they might be interested in.
  
  2. Out of stock products
  In this case, we keep the product page live on the website with a notification saying the product is out of stock and asking user to provide email address/mobile number to get an instant notification once the product is added to the stock.
• 
  Tony “Tiggerito” McCreath: +Suraj Gadage ;That's another good tip with the expire tag.
  
  I've never been keen on a redirect to a 404, it's like saying....I've move...I lied.
  
  But I'm wondering if a 302 to a 404 is a good way to say I've temporarily gone missing. I'll be back. Do you pass parameters to the 404 so it can provide the similar offers and other contextual info?
  
  Also a nice idea to provide a notification when the product is back in stock. I tried that once with a client, but we found they got better results by letting people pre-order. I'm sure that varies by what's on offer.
  
  I should write a blog out of the ideas from this post ;-)
• 
  Tony “Tiggerito” McCreath: Websites like ebay have this issue on a massive scale. From what I recall ebay will only redirect select pages that are deemed important. The rest are 404ed or even 410ed to help Googlebot focus on what's important.
• 
  Neeraj Pandey: Hi +Tony McCreath, unavailable after tag should be on the page that is for small time market and we can't remove the page
  2- the page that is not going to have items you should use other people saw these links is good but I will not recommend u 301 or 302 rather 404 is good for expired pages because 302 or 301 will simply throw soft 404 in webmaster tools until Google thinks the redirect is justified
• 
  Dave Elliott: Disagree. This is what a 302 is designed for. Temp redirect for temp out of stock....this wont apply for the 'similar' product example in the op. But, for the rest of the circumstances it is ideal. Ryan cramers solution is worth equal comsideration.
• 
  Suraj Gadage: +Tony McCreath 404 works when you know for the fact that product is never going to be added again on the website. But if the product is temporarily moved then I would keep the page live without adding any redirect. Because I want people to land on the product page and know that product will be available soon and then can get notified or pre-order (ur gave a great tip). Also, for custom 404 page, developer has set certain rules that helps us to display similar/contextual info.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this week's SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:07:35 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/short_lifetime_products +Tony McCreath
  
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