What to do with temporary out of stock page? 301 or 302 redirect?

[rubikky]

Hi...

A website I am working on need to clean up their site. Their site has over 300,000 pages as it's an e-commerce site.

I have suggested them to do the 301 redirects for the product page that are discontinued or permanently removed, which this case is ok.

But what about the temporary out of stock page which should be returning active in a couple months (or longer)?

They actually have lots of temporary out of stock pages (over 50,000 pages) which now they don't have link anywhere on site to those pages, another meaning, they are orphan page at the moment.

At first I was about to suggest to 301 redirect to their product category page (depends on which product falls into which category).

But I am afraid that 301 will cause Google to remove those temporary out of stock pages from their search result and not sure if I remove 301, those pages will get back into Google again.

So what is the best practice for those pages for the time being?


Many thanks in advance

[g1smd]

Redirecting will remove.

But should they be having a Google ranking for something out of stock anyway? That's a bad experience for visitors.

[rubikky]

Thanks g1smd. I'm concern about it as well that's why we remove all links to those temporary out of stock page from the internal link structure.

Currently, we give those pages a 404 status but we think it should be better to redirect to some useful page instead.

So you think we should give those page a 301 redirect to their main category page and we can remove it once the product is back into stock again?

Appreciate your advice.

[g1smd]

There's a clue in the word "permanent" ascribed to 301 redirects. :)

[Marshall]

I find putting a statement on the page to the effect "This item is temporarily out of stock. You can find similar items here." with a link to that item's category, or whatever is appropriate, works nicely. It provides the visitor an option and the page is not de-indexed.

Marshall

[jimbeetle]

I always recomment the same as Marshall. If you redirect visitors for a temporarily out of stock item: 1) to where are you going to redirect them? 2) where are you going to tell them the reason for the redirection?