(Entry was posted by Trey Collier on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 07/18/2019).

Undo the 301 redirect

An eCommerce site stops selling products from a mfg. They 301 redirect to other similar products or to a close category. 2 years later the mfg and them make up. Can they undo the 301 redirect of those pages and make them live again or better to create all new URLs?

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YOUR ANSWERS

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

Jeremy L. Knauff: Unless they have inbound links, simply removing the 301 probably wonâ€™t have much if any positive impact. But it wonâ€™t hurt either.

I would remove the 301s rather than creating new URLs anyway though.
Selena Vidya: I`d remove the 301 redirect so the original page is accessible again.

I don`t know the deeper details, frequency or "why" of the scenario you shared, but if the ecommerce site frequently starts, pauses, and then starts offering select products from MFGs again, they may want to consider keeping the pages live with some copy, mention the product is currently not being carried, and link to closely related products on the page. Not always the right method, but something to think about.
Michael Martinez: They can remove the 301 redirects, republish the pages (or new content), and then submit them to the search engines for recrawling. I would submit at least a few by hand. Don`t leave it to a sitemap. I`ve undone 301 redirects a few times. It took some time but worked.