Out-of-stock products and SEO: keep, redirect or remove?
Every store has products that sell out or are discontinued. What you do with their pages decides whether you keep the rankings and links they earned, or throw them away. The answer depends on one question: is the product coming back?
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The three cases
Temporarily out of stock: keep the page live and indexable. Set the availability in your structured data to OutOfStock — or BackOrder or PreOrder, if that is the truth — say on the page when it is expected back, offer a “notify me” option and link to similar products that are in stock. Do not noindex or redirect it: when stock returns, you want its rankings intact.
Discontinued, with a replacement: 301 redirect the old page to the new model or the closest equivalent. The redirect carries the old page’s links and history to a page that can still sell.
Discontinued, with no replacement: if the page has backlinks or traffic, redirect it to the most relevant category. If it has neither, let it return 404 or 410 and Google will drop it. Do not redirect everything to the homepage; Google treats that as a soft 404 — see how to fix 404 errors.
A quick decision table
- Back in stock soon: Keep live; availability OutOfStock or BackOrder; show the date; link to alternatives.
- Seasonal product: Keep live all year, so the page has rankings when the season starts.
- Replaced by a new model: 301 to the new model.
- Gone, with links or traffic: 301 to the closest category.
- Gone, no links or traffic: 404 or 410, and remove it from the sitemap and internal links.
Mistakes to avoid
- Deleting sold-out products and recreating them later at a new address.
- Leaving InStock in the structured data when the product is sold out — it misleads shoppers and goes against Google’s guidelines. See product schema markup.
- Redirecting all discontinued products to the homepage.
- Keeping hundreds of permanently unavailable products live with no content, which lowers the quality of the catalogue as a whole.
Questions people ask
- Should I noindex out-of-stock products?
- Not if they will return — noindexing drops the rankings you will want back. Remove only products that are gone for good and have no links or traffic.
- Do out-of-stock products lose rankings?
- They can: while a product cannot be bought, Google may see the page as less useful for someone ready to buy. Accurate availability and good alternatives on the page limit the damage, and pages usually recover once stock is back.
- Can an out-of-stock page be a soft 404?
- Google may treat a page as a soft 404 if it looks empty or says the product does not exist. A page that still describes the product, shows it is temporarily unavailable and offers alternatives is a normal page.