Practical guide

Discontinued products and SEO: keep, redirect or remove.

Choose how to handle out-of-stock and deleted products. A decision guide to 200, 301 and 404 with practical checks for links and destinations.

By Jonas Stenild · 8 September 2026

Start with the customer

Consider the customer opening an old product link. Are they looking for something that will return to stock, a particular model with a successor, or an item no longer sold at all? That answer is more useful than a blanket rule to redirect every error.

A practical decision table

Situation	Action	Check
Temporarily out of stock	Keep the product page with 200.	Clear availability and relevant alternatives.
Permanently replaced by an equivalent item	Consider a 301 to the successor.	Same need, working target and updated internal links.
Removed, with a relevant category available	Consider a 301 to the category.	Actual relevance and a useful selection.
Removed without a meaningful alternative	Keep a genuine 404 or 410.	A helpful error page and no false 200 status.
Still useful as an information page	Consider keeping the page with 200.	Clear discontinued status and maintained information.

Three mistakes to avoid

Everything to the homepage

A specific product URL and a homepage rarely address the same need. Review broad fallback settings and disable them when inappropriate.

Redirect chains

Point old rules directly at the final target when a destination moves again.

Error message with status 200

A page that says “not found” should not pretend to be an existing product. Check the HTTP response.

Make catalogue cleanup a repeatable process

Before deletion, export relevant product URLs, record any successor and check the product’s links. After the change, verify the response and destination, update internal links and remove deleted URLs from the product sitemap where the platform has not already done so.

Start with items where search traffic, customer needs or external links make a good transition especially valuable. Record why each manual rule exists so the next person can understand the choice.

An automatic tool can reduce repeated work. It cannot make every commercial decision about which products actually replace each other.

Measure the intended improvement

Monitor the affected URLs in Search Console and use your store’s own reporting to assess purchases and enquiries. A 301 response does not prove that rankings have been retained. Google’s HTTP status documentation explains how crawlers handle moves and missing pages.

Let’s look at your store

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