Hello,
We have a lot of products and periodically entire product lines get discontinued. In which case we remove them. This of course creates indexing issues with 404s for the pages that used to exist, and then get deleted because the products aren’t available anymore. We’ve created tens of thousands of redirects by now to redirect those pages to similar products, but is that bad in terms of crawlability budget or some other impact on SEO?
Thank you,
Ken
what’s important is this page previous SEO stats. What was the serp position, how often the link was shown and, finally did anyone/how many clicked this link.
if these are zero, or very negligible, then creating redirect will not do any good.
then in terms of crawl budget i believe 404 is a more definitive response – Google should drop this address from a list faster.
Go to Google Search Console to check the search status. If many products are not indexed, just delete them directly and let Google and other search engines index the latest products. There is no need to waste time on those unindexed products.
hi Ken.
removing discontinued products is normal, and setting up redirects for them is the right step. to answer your question, a large number of redirects is not harmful in itself. merchants create such redirect rules for thousands of patterned 404 URLs every now and then. google handles these redirects well, as long as you are ensuring that you are sending users to a relevant page. they help you preserve link equity and avoid sending users (or search engines) to broken pages.
the only risk appears when you send users to pages that are not relevant to the old URL, or you set up bulk redirects to one page (which leads to soft 404 errors), or when you create long redirect chains. this can surely waste your crawl budget. so, make sure that you avoid these practices.
let me know if you have any questions.
The issue with tens of thousands of redirects isn’t that they’re inherently harmful, but they can start causing performance and management problems at scale. Each redirect adds a tiny bit of processing time, though honestly it’s usually not a massive crawl budget issue unless you’re in the hundreds of thousands.
Here’s where you might want to rethink your strategy though. If you’re redirecting every single discontinued product to a similar product, you’re creating a management nightmare. A better approach for discontinued product lines is to redirect them to the relevant collection or category page instead of individual products.
For example, if you discontinue a specific blue widget, redirect it to your widgets collection page. This way customers still land somewhere useful, but you’re consolidating redirects and making them easier to manage. Collection pages also stick around longer than individual products, so you won’t have to keep updating redirects.
Great, Thank you - that’s exactly what I’m doing actually - redirecting to collection pages not individual products. But that’s the answer I was looking for. Appreciate it.