Consider SEO for Your Discontinued Products

Ok, seriously – who cares about products that are no longer available / discontinued? Well, you’d be pretty surprised, actually.. It could be more than you think.

In fact, by implementing this exact strategy, I’ve seen some jaw-dropping gains including £200,000 (around 20% increase) of additional revenue growth within just 60 days.

It’s a topic that I’ve spoken about before (and if you’ve been lucky enough to catch me delve in to this hot topic of eCommerce SEO, CRO and UX medley before, you’d have seen just how much of a positive impact proper SEO for discontinued products can make to a brand’s bottom line.

This post is designed to look at the why and the how in more detail and hopefully will give you a bunch of key wins you can implement on ecom / brochure sites you’re responsible for.

Can benefits more than just eCommerce

You may also be happy to hear that this same approach can work for far more than just eCommerce sites. Ultimately anything with listing pages of some sort could benefit equally as well and in some cases more so. Specific examples include real estate / property websites, job boards, classified ads etc.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a moment…

To get a feel for the problem at play here, let’s look at things from a customer’s perspective.

You’re looking to purchase a new piece of tech (let’s say you’re in the market for some new headphones) and you’re reading through some reviews online that are comparing the best cans from your shortlisted brands.

One set comes up highly recommended in What Hi-Fi. They’re in your price range and they look suitable for what you need. Cool! You’re ready to buy. You click the link for your chosen retailer annndddd…

Yeah – nice. Irritating 404 page. Buzzkill. Through a mix of disappointment and frustration, you abandon the retailer’s website.

Now, if you’re feeling especially determined that day, you may try your luck with internal search. However, as the item no longer exists on their website – you’re pretty much fresh out of luck trying to find what you’re looking for on this retailer’s site.

For the retailer? A lost sale (that they never knew they could have had) and potentially a lost customer.

Not a great position to be in regardless whether you’re the customer or not in this case.

So, why SEO dead/discontinued products?

Now, back to my original point – there are a few solid reasons why considering SEO for discontinued products could yield healthy positive results. The key points listed below:

1. Search demand often remains after the product has been discontinued
2. Reclaim noteworthy backlinks from referring domains. (Especially for popular and ‘hot topic’ items)
3. Better UX for visitors

In addition to these three points, there are two other key point to consider:

• Avoid redirects where possible
• Offering direct replacements and solid alternatives are key

We’ll look at each of these three points in more detail shortly. However, before we get in to the meat of the above, let me address this first.

In summary – there will always be exceptions, caveats and edge cases as one person pointed out on Twitter shortly after my session (there’s a TL:DR summary below the tweets if you prefer):

I'm quite confident Machine Learning would disagree. Ultimately this creates more dissapointment than satisfaction for users. Also business value is extremely low. Might be poor advise for huge websites like ebay, etsy, etc. https://t.co/7ZS6baVgIk

— Philipp Kloeckner (@pip_net) October 16, 2018

Sure, like most things, you can't just do the everything for every kind of site 🙂 … but … there are probably variations that would work on many kinds of sites.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 16, 2018

As everything in life (especially digital). There's no one size fits all solution. Also, in my talk, I specifically said not allowing all discontinued items to be indexable. How many and for how long is a business decision to make. There are always edge cases.

— Luke Carthy 🔎 (@MrLukeCarthy) October 16, 2018

TL:DR Philipp Kloeckner explains how discontinued product SEO could be poor advice for large and enterprise-scale sites like Etsy and eBay etc. However, this is exactly what these websites often do!

eBay has embraced discontinued product SEO for years…

Although I’m sure they’re not live indefinitely, eBay keeps auctions and listings online for a length of time after they’ve ended. If you’re an eBay user – I’m pretty sure you’d have seen a page like this before:

What’s even more interesting is this specific eBay listing page (at the time of writing) isn’t explicitly excluded from search engines and is still indexed in Google 7 days after the item officially ended:

To address his first point regarding disappointment, nothing’s more disappointing that a 404! Now I’ve cleared that lot up – let’s go back to addressing the three points I made earlier…

1) Search demand often remains after the product has been discontinued

Just because something is no longer available doesn’t mean the demand for this specific item dies at the same point in time.

Sure, the demand decreases over time, but people searching for these discontinued items continue to do so long after the item has discontinued. Sometimes years depending on exactly what it is and how popular it was when it was available.

For example, people searching for a job after the listing has expired is going to flat line much sooner than people searching for last year’s discontinued MacBook Pro.

Multiply this over potentially hundreds or thousands of discontinued listings/products etc and you’ve a lot of traffic potential at play here – although capturing all of it may not be ideal or beneficial so be careful here.

You’d need to work out what items are worth turning on and which items are worth turning on AND making them visible to search engines. There’s a very big difference between these two when it comes to SEO.

In other words, just because there’s a healthy amount of demand for an item that’s discontinued doesn’t always mean it’s right to expose that item to search engines.

2) Reclaim your noteworthy backlinks from referring domains

So, the product’s discontinued and now the product has been redirected or worse no redirect was configured and you’re left with a dirty 404 instead.

404 errors prevent back links to that URL from passing their equity to the website. Nothing revolutionary there. But let’s put that in to context real quick.

You’ve a broad number of product URLs that 404 (due to the fact that they’re discontinued and therefore the pages no longer exist online) which means any backlinks to these pages are not contributing to the site’s SEO.

At the very least, turning these product URLs back on and setting them to rel=”noindex,follow” would allow you to reclaim these backlinks and reduce the chance of customers seeing irritating 404 pages.

Think about an item that’s got some great attention across the interwebs and social media for example. Something that happens quite frequently in fashion and apparel; you could have attracted back links from lifestyle and fashion blogs, YouTube product reviews, shout outs on social media etc.

The product page that attracted all that attention has been removed. So, all those backlinks and social signals are practically binned. Gone, scrapped.

Reclaim these links and turn the items back on. Of course, paying particular attention to ensuring you regulate and control what discontinued items search engines are permitted to see.

Tip: Avoid redirects where possible

Redirects are awesome! Well, sometimes and if use in the correct way.

However, redirecting discontinued products to another destination (be it a category page or alternative product) isn’t always a great idea. Especially when it comes to UX.

In summary redirecting your discontinued products to an alternative location means you’ve removed that choice from the user. Chances are, you’re redirecting them to somewhere they’re not expecting to go.

If the product page remains active (redirect free) then the customer can:

1. See the product they’re looking for in the first instance
2. Realise that the item they’re looking for isn’t available
3. Can see a potential direct replacement / solid alternatives

Whether you agree with the above (or not) redirecting a potential customer elsewhere when they’re looking for a specific item is jarring and could be frustrating. Allowing the customer to be in control of what they do next is important and can help to mitigate their frustration from redirects.

Which brings me on to my next point:

Tip 2: Offering direct replacements and solid alternatives is key

If you can’t provide customers with rock-solid alternatives (or even better a direct replacement of the discontinued item) then you’re only solving half of the problem. Turning on discontinued products as a sole exercise only really benefits SEO as we touched on a little while ago.

However alternative products tackles the UX / human element of this concept; which is equally, if not more important than SEO piece.

Offering awesome direct replacements on the discontinued products page can mitigate frustration. This essential step also goes a long way to connecting a product that’s no longer available to the sale of an alternative item.

Using the eBay example from earlier. The seller’s original item has ended – here’s the relisted item (direct replacement) or something very similar (ideal alternative).

Ok – so it could look better, but it’s the suggestions that are important here.

So, what makes a rock-solid alternative?

Ok, so you’ve discontinued a red clutch bag. Suggesting other hand bags or even other red handbags isn’t enough. You need to suggest other red clutch handbags in the same ballpark price wise and clutch bags that are as similar as possible to the discontinued item.

Ultimately you have to think that the customer is naturally disappointed that the item they’re looking for is no longer available, which is precisely why any alternative suggestion really needs to hit the nail on the head. The better the alternative item(s) the more likely the visitor is to stick and buy.

3) Provide a better user experience

Letting the customer know that the product they’re looking for is no longer available and providing some great alternatives is certainly a better user experience than either a 404 or unexpectedly being redirected to an alternative destination.

How about a real-life example?

The first link (for tyre retailer Oponeo) 301 redirects to their home page:

https://www.oponeo.co.uk/tyre/michelin-energy-mxv8

This one however – the product page is still active, although the item is no longer available:

https://www.oponeo.co.uk/tyre/dunlop-grandtrek-pt8000

I’m certain you’ll agree with me that the latter is a far less confusing and far less frustrating than the first example and that’s exactly my point.

So what options do I have?

Rather than answer that question with a ridiculous essay, I consolidated the key options in to a table:

<- Table scrollable on mobile ->

Key takeaways

Remember – the above is only a guide summarising and comparing the key options when it comes to handling discontinued products. The choice is ultimately yours.

Put your customers first

In order for discontinued products SEO to work for you and your client/business – the choices you make must ultimately come down to what works best for your customers and target audience(s). Forgetting this key step could spell disaster or leave your customer base frustrated.

Consider your technical limitations (if any)

Although going for the best solution for the business is the first point of call, can your tech stack handle it? Have you any limitations on storage that would prevent discontinued products from being re-enabled? Does the business recycle SKU codes rendering it near-impossible to get old/dead products back online?

Don’t keep discontinued products indexable forever

Depending on your business, you may have more discontinued products archived than actual products available at any point in time. Naturally, enabling all of these discontinued products and making them visible and indexable to search engines is potentially damaging to your SEO. You’ll be showing search engines that you’ve more products on your website unavailable than items for sale.

To combat this, restrict how long each item is accessible to search engines after the item has discontinued.

I hope that’s got you thinking…

If nothing else, I hope this post has made you think and possibly even begin to evaluate just how to manage seemingly dead content, products, listings etc. on your own websites. Any questions etc or to discuss any of the above in more detail, feel free to drop me a line!