i think this topic should get a lot more attention since Shopify is more and more used by shops with larger inventory and it is a crucial topic when it comes to benefting from seo.
When you archive a product (this happens a lot to shops with large inventories!) the product is “deleted” from your shop and thus the link is aswell.
This means that the former link will create an 404 error when somebody tries to open it.
Shopify Staff has replied to this point that nobody will ever click this link again since it is not foundable on your shop… And here is the mistake:
If this product link has been posted anywhere in the web or even on our own shop! your SEO Ranking will be negatively affected since this link leads to an 404 page!
This could be easily solved by letting shopify admins choose to create an 301 Redirect to a !specific! Site or Collection when archiving a product.
Such as a domino effect of logic handling when that site or collection are also deleted causing more feature requirement needs.
Or more simply among millions of merchants those that would never want an archived product to redirect to a collection page.
At current redirects are an ambiguous problem best left to each merchant to build the process for handling url redirects for each businesses requirements using either the bulk import , an app, or the api. Or in tandem with theme customizations for the online-sales channel.
The only auto-redirects that are currently auto-created are when an existing non-archived resource has it’s name/title/handle changed in the admin or via the api.
Which is straightforward logic for shopify to do and to educate merchants on as the resource still points to itself. Making a resource arbitrarily point to some other resource is not straightforward and would create a lot of confusion.
Everything Paul Newton wrote is factually incorrect. BigCommerce, for example, allows for automatically redirecting product pages that are deleted (call it “archived”, if it pleases you).
Leaving nonexistent product pages as 404s is simply bad practice – and implementing a simple optional 301 when archiving pages is not only not problematic, complicated, or confusing, it is an SEO best practice that every SEO professional will agree with.