What do we do with a product page with high search engine ranking but the product is not available anymore?
We have a travel tour website. We have been doing some reviews on your website regarding mainly the products. We could see that more and more products have expired i.e. They are no longer available to sell.
We are sitting with a few options. Delete the page. The reason is that we do not want users/customers to keep visiting and seeing these products, and they would keep asking about the products. This generates a lot of work for our customer support team. We though removing the pages totally from the website is the solution.
But we can also put up a message on the product page. The message would indicate the product (i.e. the specific tour product) is no longer available for purchase.
When you consider SEO, the best method is to keep the page. But when you are keeping the page alive, you will have to maintain it. The answer is yes and no. Yes, because you need to display a message (that the product is unavailable). No, because that is the only one thing you will have to do.
Refer to the Mobile SEO Best Practices guide. In the guide, this is the explanation.
One of the high ranking pages could be a product page, and the problem is the specific product has become expired. i.e. You are no longer selling this specific product.
Often marketers and/or webmaster would quickly remove/delete the expired product page.
From the product management point of view, this is completely normal decision.
From the search engine optimization point of view, this is a problem.
The best option is the easiest option i.e. Keep the expired product page. This way, you are keeping the page URL alive without actively harming your Google organic search ranking (of the page URL).
On the page, you can:
Add a message to tell the visitor the product is unavailable, or
Add a link to a similar or an alternative product.
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