Inactive Products - Inactive URLs

[viatrading1]

Hi,

In our website www.viatrading.com we have many products that might be in stock or not depending on availability.

Until now, when a product was not available anymore, we took this page down (and redirected to its product category page). And, only if the product was available again, we re-activated the URL - this might be days, months or even years later.

To make this more SEO-friendly, we decided now that while a product is not available, instead or deactivating/redirecting the page, we will leave it online and just add a message saying "This product is currently not available".

If we do this, we will automatically re-activate about 500 products pages at once.

1. Just to make sure, is it harmful for SEO to keep activating/deactivating URLs this way?

2. Since most of these pages have been deindexed for a long time due to being redirected - have they lost all their SEO juice?

3. How can we better activate these old 500 pages - is it ok activating them all at once?

Thank you,

[viatrading1]

Thanks you Thomas, we activated them - and will try to improve our "Related Products" and "Availability Notification" section for inactive products.

Cheers,

[BlueprintMarketing]

You can reactivate them all at once. I think the most important thing to have is a warning system for your customers, so you are not advertising that product, where they have to go down that path to find out it, is not available.

But as an end-user as well as an SEO I would strongly recommend keeping the URLs live and having some sort of a simple "out of stock" banner activate rather than deactivate 500 URLs at a time.

1. Do not remove the item completely and create a “not found” error page.
2. Do not redirect the out of stock item to the homepage.
3. Do not display conflicting messages (“out of stock” and “in stock” at the same time)
4. Display the out of stock items with a clear red sign saying it’s out of stock.
5. Display many similar products based on product name, color, brand, category etc. (the more similarities the better)
6. Do not randomize similar products each time, enable saving and bookmarking.
7. Make sure your product page is still useful not just an archived one.

Here are a few helpful URLs talking about how to deal with out of stock merchandise on a site.

• https://ahrefs.com/blog/ecommerce-out-of-stock-products/
• http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882
• https://www.seroundtable.com/sold-out-seo-e-commerce-14305.html
• https://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-errors-ecommerce-websites/

I hope this is been of help,

Thomas

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