Out of Stock Products: SEO Best Practices for Online Stores
Keep, redirect or remove? How to handle temporarily and permanently unavailable products without losing traffic.
Products sell out and get discontinued. What you do with their pages affects your rankings, your customers' experience, and your Google Shopping listings. The right answer depends on whether the product is coming back.
Temporarily out of stock: keep the page
- Keep the page live and indexable โ it holds rankings and links.
- Show the status clearly near the price and the expected restock date if you know it.
- Offer "notify me when available" so you capture the customer.
- Show similar in-stock alternatives.
- Update Product schema
availabilityto OutOfStock (or BackOrder/PreOrder when accurate). - Update the feed's
availabilitytoout_of_stockso ads and free listings stop showing it as available.
Permanently discontinued: decide by value
- A newer version or close replacement exists โ 301 redirect to it.
- No replacement, but the page has links or traffic โ keep it live as an information page, clearly marked as discontinued, with links to alternatives; or redirect to the most relevant category.
- No replacement, no links, no traffic โ return a 404 or 410. Read 410 vs 404 for SEO.
Avoid redirecting everything to the homepage โ Google may treat it as a soft 404. See how to fix soft 404 errors.
Seasonal products
Keep seasonal product and category pages at the same URL year after year. Mark products unavailable off-season and update them when they return, so the page keeps its history and links.
Keep feed and site in sync
Availability mismatches between your feed and your landing page are a common Merchant Center problem. Update both together, ideally automatically, and check the feed with the Merchant Center feed validator. Read how to fix Merchant Center errors.
Category pages
Many sold-out products on a category page frustrate shoppers. Sort in-stock items first, or offer a filter to hide unavailable products. See SEO for ecommerce category pages.
A worked example
A phone accessories store deleted products as soon as they sold out, creating hundreds of 404s โ including for popular cases that were restocked weeks later at new URLs. It changed its process: sold-out items stayed live with a restock notice and alternatives; discontinued models redirected to their newer versions. Rankings for its main products stabilised, and restock alerts became a steady source of sales.
Out-of-stock page checklist
- Status shown clearly next to the price.
- Add-to-cart replaced by "Notify me".
- Expected restock date shown if known.
- Three to six in-stock alternatives displayed.
- Schema availability and feed availability updated.
- Page still indexable and linked from its category.
Check one out-of-stock product a month to make sure your platform still behaves the way you set it up.
Related guides
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Frequently asked questions
Should I noindex out-of-stock products?
Not if they are coming back. Keep them indexable with clear availability.
What should I do with discontinued product pages?
Redirect to a close replacement, keep as an information page if valuable, or remove if they have no value.
How do I show out of stock in Google Shopping?
Set availability to out_of_stock in your feed and on the page.
Do out-of-stock pages hurt SEO?
Not when handled well. Problems come from deleting or redirecting pages carelessly.