Dealing with Discontinued Stock in a Search Friendly Way

Ever get to the point where you’re out of stock and its been discontinued? Typically you just delete the item or un-check ‘active’ to hide it.

Why is this a bad idea? Because that product has been gathering authority (or Link Juice) from the search engines and if you just hide then boom all that authority is gone and wasted!

Also you then have potential customers coming to your site landing on a page that says “Sorry, no matches were found containing ****** “. This isn’t search friendly, nor is it visitor friendly and people just aren’t patient any more.

I’ve found that a better way to handle it is to keep the product live, keep all the nice content that is bringing you rankings, and create a duplicate Product Detail template that leaves out the tag that adds in the Add to Cart template. This effectively removes the Add to Cart button. You can even replace that tag with “We are Sorry, this Product is Discontinued”.

You will need to assign that new template you created to the product. Open the Product up in your Store Admin and load up the Product Information page so you can see the Basic Information section and look for ‘Product Detail Template:’ and then pick the new product detail template from the dropdown list. 🙂

Finally, you find other products that are similar to the discontinued one and add them to the Related section for the discontinued product.

This way you keep the traffic coming in, you send the authority you’ve gathered to products that could use it, and give your customers some additional options.