Research shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the user’s shift from offline to online shopping by five years.
This means not only that more consumers are shopping online this year than ever before, but also that, thanks to the advances and systems put in place by companies during the pandemic, the standards by which consumers set their expectations have definitely risen.
In this new competitive environment, therefore, consumers will place even more importance on aspects of the shopping experience such as product availability.
From an SEO perspective, the proper handling of products that are no longer available but are well positioned within the search engine is a crucial aspect of not losing valuable organic traffic.
Therefore, in this article we will look at the various ways to deal with product unavailability without harming SEO and to turn product unavailability into potential online sales.
It is worth noting that there is no single “right way” to deal with out-of-stock. Solutions can sometimes also be influenced by the limitations of the platform you are using.
So what to do when a product is temporarily out of stock, or withdrawn, should be part of the initial strategy of the site. However, this is something that is often overlooked.
The leitmotif of any decision should be to make the experience of the consumer, who will inevitably go into “disappointment” when they see that the product they are looking for is no longer available, as little negative as possible.
Let us see, in practical terms, what this means.
Identify and manage different types of out-of-stocks
Product availability can often change due to:
- withdrawn products;
- end of stock in the warehouse;
- products that are only sold over a certain period of time.
The unavailability of a product must be communicated to Google in the best possible way, and it is therefore important to differentiate between the temporary unavailability of an item and a total discontinuation of it within e-commerce.
Temporary product unavailability
If the approximate date of product availability is known and is between one and four weeks, it is not worth deleting, hiding or replacing the page.
But it may make sense to try to solve the problem of its temporary unavailability in a “marketing way,” i.e., for example, by putting a countdown to the day of delivery with the option to purchase or pre-order the item, or include an e-mail capture form to notify customers when the product returns to stock.
If you offer the user a discount for the extended wait time, many of those who do not need the product immediately will surely take advantage of the opportunity to purchase the product at a lower price.
(yes, okay, this is a 404 page but in short, you get the idea).
Products discontinued and with unknown back in stock date
Page 410
The 410 Status Code (Gone) is used to communicate that a page has been permanently removed and will no longer be available in the future. The difference with the 404 Status Code (Not Found) is that the latter only indicates that the requested resource was not found on the server, and thus is temporarily unavailable, but may come back online in the future.
So the use of the 410 status code may be of particular interest as it can actually speed up the process of removing the web page from Google’s index.
In any case, an error page usually leads to a poor user experience, with the result that the user will be inclined to abandon the store. On the other hand, old product pages that generate neither traffic nor sales would not give any SEO benefit. So, in this case, those pages should be deleted and replaced by a useful 410 error page.
The 410 page should not be a standard page, but a well-customized page to keep the user within your e-commerce (like this one used long ago by Steve Madden).
It is a good practice to take advantage of this page to display a selection of products that are similar in price and/or features to the one sold out, so as to keep the user within the website and still try to get a conversion.
However, this solution, by removing the page from Google’s index, does not preserve its ranking and, if the page receives backlinks, its link juice, i.e., authority from inbound links.
Redirect 301
If the page receives valuable backlinks from other websites/blogs, then it is important to make sure not to waste their link juice.
This is the situation in which to use a 301 redirect-ideally to a closely related product or, if there are no other similar products, to the category page to which the product belongs.
However, while this might be favorable from an SEO point of view, ideally the user should be informed that they have been redirected because the product they clicked on is out of stock. Otherwise, one might feel confused or misled.
Another thing to avoid is to redirect all pages to the homepage just because they have external links: this may make them classify as a soft 404 error and may lose their link equity. Even this solution does not allow you to keep the rankings achieved by the redirected page because its content (which made the ranking possible) will no longer be available.
Leave the product page as it is (with proper modifications!).
There are cases when it is worth leaving unavailable product pages online.
Users may want to return to the product page to find more information, for example, for technology products, to download their manual, check for updates, or other information.
If the e-commerce has only a few products, or if a product has achieved a good ranking, it is best to leave the page active. At least as long as there is still a significant amount of searches on the product that is no longer available.
In this case, it is extremely important to clearly show that the item is out of stock and avoid making the user display conflicting messages (e.g., “out of stock” and “in stock” at the same time).
And of course, if we want to keep consumers’ interest active, it pays to offer them an alternative, for example by including a carousel of similar products. This is the only solution that allows, at least temporarily, not to lose the ranking acquired by the page.
It will be useful in this case to monitor the Analytics of such pages, to recognize those that manage to bring conversions, and thus be useful, even if the product is sold out.
In addition, you can leverage the traffic on these pages to implement retargeting strategies.
Seasonal products and categories
“Seasonal” products or categories include Christmas product pages, Black Friday deals, gift ideas for special holidays and celebrations, you name it!
Seasonal products require very strong category pages; in fact, these are highly likely to rank in SERPs, rather than individual products.
To build strong seasonal or promotional pages you should try to maintain the usual 2/4 pages each year, without changing the URL, and optimize those category pages with original text and internal links. During the rest of the year you can decide to convert such pages to informational content, to allow them to continue to build visibility in organic results, and then return to “sales” content when the time is right. In the meantime, you can also decide to remove page from the main navigation menu when not needed-no one will suffer too much.
If the products included in these “extraordinary” categories have a different URL than the original product tab, each product page will be canonized with the corresponding one in the main category.
For example, the domain.com/black-friday/product-super-in-discount page will need to contain the following
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://dominio.com/prodotto” />
Meta tag “unavailable_after”
To conclude with an evaluation of all the possibilities, it is also worth mentioning the unavailable_after meta tag, a recommended solution for large e-commerce.
This tag indicates the expiration of the validity of a page, that is, that after that date the content present at that address should no longer be scanned by the search engine.
The date and time must be specified in a widely adopted format that includes, for example, RFC 822, RFC 850, and ISO 8601.
