Discontinued Products and the Pages That Ranked

The page that disappears

A supplier stops making something, the last one sells, and the owner deletes its page to keep the shop tidy. It feels like housekeeping.

But the page did not only exist inside the shop. Search results, bookmarks, old order emails, forum posts and other people's websites all point to its address.

After the deletion, every one of them leads to an error. The visitor who arrives sees a message that nothing is there, and usually leaves.

Some of those pages had been bringing in searches every week for years. That is the part nobody counts before pressing delete.

Who still looks for it

• Past buyers who want another one exactly like the first.
• Owners needing parts, refills or a matching piece.
• People following instructions that name the product, such as a pattern or a recipe.
• Readers of an old review or forum thread that linked to your page.
• Shoppers comparing the old model with whatever replaced it.

The third group lasts longest. A pattern, a guide or a how-to video that names a product keeps sending people to search for it long after the product itself is gone.

What deleting does

A deleted page answers with a not found error, the code browsers and search engines know as a 404.

Google keeps checking for a while, then drops the page from its results. Whatever the page had earned in searches for that product's name goes with it.

Links from other websites still point at the old address, so the value they carried now points at nothing.

And the visitors who do arrive meet a generic error instead of the alternatives you would happily have sold them.

Finding the pages that earned their keep

Before deciding anything, look at what each discontinued page was actually doing.

In Analytics, the landing pages report for the past year shows how many visits began on each product page. A page that started visits every week has an audience.

In Webmaster Tools, the search queries report shows which pages appear in Google's results, and the links report shows which pages other sites point to.

The Crawl Errors report lists addresses Google tried and found missing, with the pages that still link to them. In a shop that has been deleting products, it is often a long list.

Keep the page and say so plainly

For a product with a following, the best answer is usually to keep the page at the same address and change what it says.

Put a clear note at the top: no longer available, and why, if you know. Remove the price and the button that adds it to the cart.

Keep the description and the specifications, since people use them to compare. Then list the two or three closest alternatives, with a sentence on how each differs.

Take the page out of category listings and the shop's own search, so browsing customers are not shown something they cannot buy.

A worked example

An alpaca fibre shop on a small farm sells yarn, roving and knitting kits made from its own herd's fleece and from two neighbouring farms, in a shop beside the barn and online.

Its best-known yarn was a sport-weight blend of alpaca and silk, used in a free cowl pattern the shop had published. Knitters shared the pattern widely, and pattern pages elsewhere linked to the yarn.

When the mill stopped spinning the blend and the last skeins sold, the product page was deleted. Every one of those links now ended in an error.

The owner found out from emails asking whether the shop had stopped selling online.

The page went back up at its old address, marked discontinued at the top, with two yarns of the same weight and similar yardage listed below and a note on how each changes the drape.

Knitters arriving from the pattern now land where they expected, get an answer, and see what to buy instead.

Redirect when there is a true replacement

When a product has a direct successor, such as the same item in a new version, a permanent redirect is the cleaner choice.

This kind of redirect, which developers call a 301, forwards anyone who asks for the old address, people and search engines alike, and tells Google to treat the new address as the page from now on.

Say on the new page what it replaces, so someone looking for the old name knows they are in the right place.

Do not redirect every discontinued product to the home page. Google tends to read a redirect that lands somewhere unrelated as if the page had simply gone, and visitors are left wondering what happened.

Let the rest go properly

Products nobody searched for, nobody linked to and nobody will miss can be removed.

Make sure the address then returns a real not found response, and that the error page itself helps: a search box, the main categories and a phone number.

Out of stock is not discontinued

A product that will be back in the autumn is a different case. Keep its page, say when it is expected, and offer to email people when it returns.

Deleting seasonal items and creating them again each year under new addresses throws away the history each page has built.

A rule for the next one

Most shop software can hide a product from listings while leaving its page reachable, and most can set up redirects. How depends on the platform, and whoever maintains the shop will know.

What matters is the routine. Nobody deletes a product page until someone has decided which of the three it gets: kept with a note, redirected, or removed.

The counter-case

A small shop with a few dozen products and little search traffic has less at stake, and checking each discontinued page may take longer than it repays.

Shops whose stock changes daily, such as consignment or one-of-a-kind goods, need a lighter version: sold pages kept as a record, without a separate decision for each.

And a supplier's terms sometimes require old products to come down.

For any page that earned visits or links, though, keep it with a note or redirect it rather than deleting it.

Before the next product goes

1. List discontinued products from the past year.
2. Check landing page visits for each one.
3. Read the Crawl Errors report in Webmaster Tools.
4. Restore pages that still bring visitors.
5. Redirect products with a direct replacement.
6. Add alternatives to every kept page.
7. Agree who decides before anything is deleted.

Step three is the quickest way to see the damage already done. It lists addresses that have stopped working along with the sites still sending people to them, which shows where to start.

Keeping product addresses intact when the whole shop moves is covered in an online shop built on software from 2009.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.