Discontinued Products Causing Multiple 404s via Collection URLs – Best Practice?

Technical Q&A
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1

Hi everyone,

I’m dealing with a real SEO issue for a Shopify store and would love to hear how others are handling this.

Scenario:

  • A product exists in multiple collections (e.g. 5–6 collections)

  • The product is later discontinued / Archived

  • Google has already indexed URLs like:

    /collections/collection-a/products/product-handle
/collections/collection-b/products/product-handle

  • Once the product is removed, each of these URLs returns a 404

So a single discontinued product can suddenly generate multiple 404 errors in Google Search Console — one for every collection it previously belonged to.

:red_question_mark: What I’m Trying to Figure Out

From an SEO and Shopify best-practice perspective:

  • Is this expected behavior in Shopify?

  • Should we be:

    • Redirecting each collection product URL?

    • Redirecting only the canonical product URL?

    • Keeping products unpublished instead of deleting?

  • How are others preventing a spike of 404s when discontinuing products that live in multiple collections?

:brain: What I’ve Considered So Far

  • Shopify automatically handles the main product URL (/products/handle) if redirected

  • But collection-based product URLs are still crawled and reported as 404

  • Manually adding redirects for every collection path doesn’t scale well

:speech_balloon: Open Question to the Community

How do you handle discontinued products that were part of multiple collections without creating SEO issues or excessive 404s?

Any insights, workflows, or SEO-friendly approaches would be really appreciated.

Thanks!

2

Yes this is expected behavior. When you delete the product page it no longer exists (404). The best, and easiest thing to do is redirect to another product or collection.

3

Thank you for the reply but our client discontinued almost every week one product and if product is in 6 collections then they need to create 7 redirects which is not ideal. What else can be the solution?

4

Actually redirecting the most ideal thing to do, both for the customer and for seo. Especially if you have customers trying to go to those pages from old email links or social media post. And even if you don’t get all collection urls the 404 page, if managed and customized by the theme, can be an ok thing to have. 404s are OK. They’re not the boogieman.

5

Thank you again but do you think there is any app to do this automatically?

6

Sure there are several apps for managing and automating redirects in the Shopify App Store. I would thoroughly check their features and pricing.

7

Technically, you should be able to use Flow to create redirects.
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shopify-flow/reference/actions/create-redirect-url

“Product deleted” trigger is probably too late, but “Product variant out of stock” with further check if all variants are OOS would be a good time to create redirects.
Anyway, redirects would not work while product still exists and is published.

But this only makes sense if the product was really bringing in traffic /ranked high in SERPs/ clicked by searchers often.

Creating redirect(s) will simply move these URLs from “404” category to “URL with redirect”.

“404” is not an error – it’s a signal for Google to remove this URL from index.
People tend to treat these diagnostic categories as errors while in most cases they are not.

It would be an error if your existing, published and in stock product generates 404, but if your product is deleted then 404 is a proper response from your server.

8

as you specifically asked for an app, you can consider using adnabu’s redirect manager app. not only will it help you create redirects and preserve traffic, but also track different metrics such as how many broken links are there across your store, broken 404 visits, etc.