Dealing with out of stock products is a common issue amongst eCommerce websites and it’s not always straight forward as to how to approach the subject. I could so easily have setup a header for temporary out of stocks, permanent out of stocks etc. but often it’s a case of weighing up the benefits and risks of SEO vs user journey and coming up with a sensible compromise.

The simplest method of dealing with the out of stock product pages is to maintain them and have some kind of widget that displays suitable alternatives that are in stock, this way we’re able to keep the page in the index and not cause too much distress to the user. However many smaller or older sites may not have this type of functionality.

In the event your unable to offer alternatives it might simply be sensible and entirely justifiable to redirect the out of stock item to a relevant alternative page, you could do this as a 302 temporary redirect to avoid the page being removed from the index and losing value if the out of stock is only temporary. Recently I worked with a client who had several thousand products discontinued, considering the constraints on their resources it was simply much more reasonable to setup permanent 301 redirects to relevant alternatives, where there were none we simply redirected to the nearest category level page.

Something else to consider is that removing large numbers of discontinued or out of stock product pages may suggest that your site is shrinking which may send a negative signal to Google, however the negative impact of removing hundreds or thousands of discontinued products has to be weighed up against the gains, it’s likely this may actually help reduce bounce rates or increase conversions by directing to a relevant in stock item. Other things to consider:

Inform the user it’s OOS

If the out of stock is temporary and you decide to keep the current landing page remember to remove the buy button or setup a notice in the sale process to notify the user.

Protect those precious conversions

Want to avoid losing a sale? Add an ‘email when in stock’ button to let people know when you have the item back on sale.

Save money on your PPC

Remember to edit your PPC campaigns accordingly, you could be spending a fortune on clicks only for visitors to land on an out of stock page so keep your campaigns updated. There are a number of tools available which flag up when a PPC product drops out of stock.

Adjust your internal search

If you have the flexibility edit your site’s internal site search settings to drop that page lower within the search results or possibly remove it entirely (if appropriate).

Adjust your search strategy

Don’t invest in link building to an out of stock product, switch your focus to improve rankings on products that will convert. Consider editing your sitelink profile in webmaster tools, if you have an entire category out of stock you may as well remove this if it returns in sitelinks for your brand search terms.