Removing pages of "sold out" merchandise

[AmyNY]

What do you do when merchandise with keywords that attract traffic has sold out and there are no plans to replace it. Until now, I have put "sold out" next to the product. Recently customers have started to comment about this. I know it is time to remove some of the old products. I have gone through the logs and plan to remove the least popular pages. I am, however, concerned about the loss of traffic from search engines and also from anyone who bookmarked the pages. The website has over 200 pages with 100s of items. What do you do when a good, high traffic page is no longer useful?

Amy

[Essex_boy]

Place a custom error page in their place that customers wont see a 404.

I imagine the reason you want to keep the pages is that you have simmilar products for sale else where on your site.

You could try puting a link to the alternative product on that page, it does seem a waste to just remove it.

[Easy_Coder]

I use a 'Discontinued Models' page which can do 2 things:

- Keep valuable traffic coming in

- Irritate customers becuase they don't always read the 'Dicontinued' part. This inevitably leads to an email where you have an opportunity to recommend another 'like' item. For example perhaps the model the customer is looking for has been replaced by a newer version.

But the trade-off is worth it for me because it keeps opportunity alive.

[jweighell]

I make sure that the page redirects to the category page that it's in, that way if the customer gets to that page from a SE, then it'll take them to the next best page.

[Joop]

The problem with having discontinued is that if you have a lot of them, they just clutter up your site - at some point you'll need to get rid of them.

[SkyDog]

What I plan to do for the same situation is to simply leave the individual product page on the site, but mark it as "out of stock" or "discontinued" and remove the item from the main site catalog. It is still useful as an entry page if you are getting traffic. You can place cross/up sell items along with the regular category links. Eventually if it's not linked to the main site catalog it will fall out of the search engine rankings. If this will have a major impact on your business, you could add a discontiued section to your site map so that the page will still be indexed.