For an e-commerce website, it’s crucial to maintain a positive user experience. So when discontinued items happen, what does one do? It’s crucial to maintain effective navigation and brand communication for your audience while adhering to SEO best practices.
Let’s say that you’re an administrator for a web store that sells pet supplies. Now here comes a common occurrence for all e-comm owners. Your supplier stops making a leading brand of cat food. Your product landing page is no longer needed. You ought to think twice about hitting that delete button.
I’ve seen this happen far too often when a discontinued popular product gets deleted the ranking visibility disappears almost overnight and traffic plummets.
Just take a minute to think about where your traffic ends up. Yes, your traffic could disappear!
What would happen if your site traffic goes to a competitor that still had organic visibility for the discontinued product?
If you were operating in a competitive sector, what could be worse?
Tell me what you mean by a discontinued product?
Let’s define what a discontinued product is. So this can be described as something that you’ll never stock anymore on your web store or the manufacturer has effectively discontinued production of an item.
Your course of action largely depends on the product which is to be discontinued but let’s use an example that best demonstrates SEO best practice. You are selling Widget X which is popular by all accounts giving you plenty of site traffic. Suddenly the manufacturer pulls the plug and your stock inventory dwindles to zero. That site traffic is still arriving but potential customers obviously can’t buy.
Keep your customers interested
Let’s weigh out the options. Firstly, full deletion of the page and binning the URL. With the page showing a 404 error, ranking visibility will disappear and all chances of maintaining any kind of site traffic (and sales) are gone. Using a 404 is your worst option, especially when your 404 page is not helpful.
Secondly, using a 410 code does eliminate rank visibility as it tells engines that the page is no longer available and will not return.
Using either of these codes is something that should be seriously thought through. Both are not ideal from a customer or search engine perspective.
What about using 301 redirects? There are specific use cases for this option. Let’s say your manufacturer of the discontinued product has created a new version. That could be a good reason to use a redirect.
Resist the need to 301 redirect users to the homepage, main category page or unrelated products. Users are likely to end up being confused, resulting in increased exit and bounce rates for your site.
For a potential customer, the best thing to do is have a page that offers clear alternatives to Widget X. These alternate product/s could have similar features to Widget X so will improve the chance of providing a better experience for your users.
Page messaging should be customised and geared towards conversion. How the alternate products are shown on the page can only be determined by the limits of your e-commerce CMS. Typically, the products could appear as an image list or a scrolling carousel. Your messaging should be placed prominently in a text block above the fold or used in an opening dialogue box. Make sure you monitor your approach using data and even some AB testing at this point.
So you’ve set up the messaging and alternate products, now what? Well, let’s not keep discontinued products in your site search or internal linking. This is especially true when many products become discontinued and you need to maintain your website user experience. Create an XML sitemap that contains all your discontinued items. Let engines know that these pages still exist without necessarily showing them to the user.
How long would you keep your discontinued product pages live?
Typically around 12 months but look at your analytics data to get to know when interest has fully dwindled. By then, it can be possible to look towards using a 410 status code as one option. When redirecting towards another similar product, look at your user data to ascertain which alternative product to point to.
So let’s see an example of this. Technology is prone to all sorts of product discontinuation whether it becomes outdated or doesn’t work. Laptops can become obsolete in the space of months.
Let’s look at how computer giant, Lenovo handles out-of-production items.
With the page still active anyone searching for the laptop specifications can immediately be prompted to look at alternate laptop models within the same spec and price point. Let’s see how long Lenovo will keep this particular page live.
This product page strategy is ideal for tech, but I see uses in more specialist products such as luxury cars, yachts, property etc. In those markets, it’s possible to salvage residue link equity from probable backlinks as well.
The recommendation to handle discontinued products is to get your user experience right. Don’t be too hasty to pull the trigger on pages. The 404 could well be the death knell for your traffic and any kind of customer goodwill. Think about using the situation to your site’s advantage, playing up to the strengths of your overall customer service.