You've been running an ecommerce site for several years. You have hundreds or thousands of products.
What's the best practice to use when a product is discontinued?
- What is best for search engine optimization (SEO)
- What is best for your customers
- What is best for you (a combination of the above 2, in other words, maximize revenue.
Well, what if I just leave all my old pages up with a note that the product is discontinued? Well that won't create a lot of conversions. Also, search engines are pretty smart and they may realize that pages without a buy button aren't as valuable for searchers as those with.
Also, most search engines will only index a certain number of pages from your site, unless you have very high pagerank, i.e. an extremely high profile site with massive amounts of incoming links like Wikipedia.org. Wouldn't you rather have your latest and greatest returned in searches than those items that customer can't buy?
The best possible approach is to intelligently program a "301 redirect" for the obsolete page. This will tell search engines that a page has permanently moved, and automatically forward the web browsing public transparently to the new page. It's best in this case to forward the obsolete page to a page showing similar products, such as the category page for the product they tried to reach. Here is a good article on programming 301 redirects for various hosting platforms and web languages.
The worst practice is to just remove the page and then provide a totally unhelpful generic "404 not found" page. If you must do these, at least provide a custom 404 page with your logo and links back to the main page of your site. Here is a great resource for configuring 404 pages on your server (covers many server types)
Taking some time to work through this common problem and come up with a uniform, customer friendly solution can pay big dividends in the form of happier customers and better search engine results going forward.
