sniffer - 2:14 pm on May 17, 2010 (gmt 0)

Killing the page makes sense if your customer service team keeps taking calls for an item which is no longer available

In this case I redirect to the product category, rather than a similar item. I can't say for certain that this is effective, but at least it shows a long-tail searcher that we've got a lot of products similar to the one thing they were looking for...