Discontinued products and variants (SEO)

SEO
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1

What is the recommended procedure regarding products that are discontinued or variants (ex: colour or sizes) from the same product? Thanks

2

i am assuming, you are looking for an answer related to SEO best practices.

if you discontinue a product or variant, here’s what you can do:

  1. in case of a discontinued product, add a Shopify redirect to another related or complementary product.
  2. in case of a discontinued variant, add a Shopify redirect to another variant of the same product. so, for example if you sell t-shirts in black, white, and brown, and if you discontinue the brown variant, create a redirect to the black or white variants.

these redirects will help ensure that visitors don’t land on 404 pages and that you don’t lose SEO rankings for your store.

3

Hey @JVinagre! If a product or a variant (like a certain color or size) is discontinued, the best thing for SEO is to keep the product page live instead of deleting it. You can simply mark the item or variant as “out of stock” and suggest similar products. That way, you don’t lose the traffic or SEO value from Google. If the product has a newer replacement, you can set up a redirect to the new product page so the SEO value transfers over. The only time you should delete or redirect a page is when it no longer gets traffic and has no related product to point to. Hope this helps! :blush:

4

Hi,

Hope this will help

Temporary out of stock: Keep page, show “Sold Out,” collect emails.

Discontinued product:

  • Best: Keep page + “Discontinued” note + links to alternatives (great if it gets traffic).

  • Or: 301 redirect old product → replacement or closest collection.

  • Never: 404 or send to homepage.

Discontinued variant: Keep the main product, hide the variant, and 301 any variant URLs to the main product (or nearest in-stock variant).

5

Hi @JVinagre :waving_hand: SEARCH first, respect your time and the time of others already given in existing conversations.
e.g. https://community.shopify.com/search?q=discontinued+products

Recognize because your asking a very vague broad question,
As every situation can be different, especially because it’s SEO in the mix
For actual SEO impact or to avoid issues engage with an actual SEO specialist.

Take any recommendations and bot responses here at the peril of your businesses conversion rates.

Don’t overthink it if your not following an actual SEO specialists plan.
For variants just remove them from the product, or set enable inventory controls and update the variant option name to reflect it’s status.
For products there is now an unlisted status so products are still on the store but not crawled or show up on in-store search.
Use this in tandem with an alternate template with purchasing options disabled, and like variants with inventory settings to prevent cart/checkout attempts.

Or delete products and put the data into a metaobject and use metaobjects webpages feature if there’s some reason to still show online.

etc etc etc It’s a long list of consideration get an actual consultation.