Keeping Sold Items Live & SEO

Ask Me Anything Q&A SEO Office Hours Repo

Topic summary

An artist selling original oil paintings wants to keep sold items visible on their website to demonstrate sales history, pricing, and inspire future commissions. They’re concerned whether displaying sold-out inventory might negatively impact SEO.

Key clarification: Google doesn’t penalize sites for showing out-of-stock items, so keeping sold paintings live is acceptable from an SEO perspective.

Recommended best practice: Implement filtering functionality that allows visitors to easily view only available paintings, ensuring a better user experience.

Consideration raised: When sold items rank higher than available inventory for target keywords, it may be better to prioritize in-stock products for landing pages, as users are more likely to convert when they can actually purchase.

Technical implementation: Shopify users can set inventory conditions on collections to automatically filter products while keeping them accessible via direct links or search.

Summarized with AI on November 1. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hi Kyle – First thanks for your help! I’m wondering if the way I keep sold out items on my website hurts my SEO. And ideas appreciated if it does.

So I sell original oil paintings, and when they sell I like to keep the product on my website, because:

  1. It helps show customers a track record of sells, and my price point.

  2. Gives clients ideas of past work I’ve done and encourages future sales.

Does keeping the sold item live hurt my SEO? Does Google care if my website has a bunch of sold out items? Because it’s a unique painting, it will not be restocked.

Example: https://courtneyholder.com/collections/shop-original-paintings/products/blue-heron-painting-original-oil-painting-of-blue-heron-on-caddo-lake-east-texas-bayou-wildlife-painting

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2

No, that’s fine, just make sure it’s easy for users to filter to only see paintings that are in-stock.

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3

how do you do that? The filters? I have been changing my titles to start with Zsold… that way SOLD is in the early part of the title and hopefully not missed… the z is for alphabetizing listings and putting the sold things at the end. Is that a dumb thing to do?

4

Great – good to know. Is this true even if my sold out item is ranking higher than other none sold out items for a set of keywords?

5

If you think alphabetical is the best way to order your listings, then yes. But you might prefer to sort them in a custom way - and in that case, it’s not a great strategy.

You can add inventory as a condition for collections like this (the products will still be visible if the user is sent a link or searches for them):

Screenshot 2025-02-13 at 5.18.19 PM.png
Screenshot 2025-02-13 at 5.18.19 PM.png1294×566 39.2 KB

6

I mean, in that case, you might need to decide if it’s better for users to land on a product page that is in-stock vs OOS. I would suspect that in-stock is better.

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7

OK thank you! C