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How to Handle Temporarily Out-of-Stock Product Pages

The next few months are going to be uncharted territory for all of us, with serious challenges for both brick-and-mortar and online businesses. Many e-commerce sites are already facing a unique situation right now, and it looks something like this:
These are hand sanitizer results from Staples.com, and this screenshot is just a portion of the first page. I'm not picking on Staples — this page is representative of a problem across every major e-retailer right now. While there are many ways to handle out-of-stock and discontinued items under normal conditions, this situation is very specific:
  1. Multiple similar items are out-of-stock at the same time
  2. Retailers may not know when they'll be back in stock
  3. These products may not stay back in stock for long
  4. Demand is high and continuing to rank is critical
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From an SEO standpoint, it's essential that these pages continue to rank, both for consumers and retailers, but in the short-term, the experience is also frustrating for consumers and can drive them to other sites.

Is this a technical SEO problem?


The short answer is: not really. We want these pages to continue to rank — they're just not very useful in the short-term. Let's take a quick look at the usual toolbox to see what applies.

Option #1: 404 (Not Found)

This one's easy. Do not 404 these pages. These products are coming back and you want to sell them. What's more, you want to be able to act quickly when they're back in stock. If you remove the page and then put it back (and then, most likely, remove it again and put it back again), it can take Google a lot of time to reconcile those signals, to the point where the page is out of sync with reality. In other words, by the time the page starts ranking again, the product might already be out of stock again.

Option #2: 301 (Permanent Redirect)

As tools go, 301s still have a special place in our tool belts, but they're not a good bet here. First, the product still exists. We don't really want to move it in any permanent sense. Second, reversing a 301 can be a time-consuming process. So, just like with 404s, we're likely to shoot ourselves in the foot. The only exception would be if a product went out of stock and that prompted the manufacturer to permanently replace it with a similar product. Let's say Acme Essentials ran out of the 10-ounce Mountain Fresh hand sanitizer, so decided just to do away with that product and replace it with the 12-ounce option. In that case, by all means 301-redirect, but that's going to be a fairly rare situation.
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Location: New Delhi, Delhi, India

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