The stockout item is the one with the longest tail. When a product goes out of stock, most stores fall into one of three defaults without ever deciding: leave the page up, redirect it to the category, or delete it. Only the first one keeps the search history that page spent months building, so the other two turn a temporary supply problem into a permanent visibility one.
Thirty seconds, no tools, for anyone reading. Type site: then your domain with no space, then the name of a product you stopped selling last year. If nothing comes back, that page is gone from Google, and the next product you retire will go the same way.
I spent this summer going through 197 online stores in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. The things that actually moved anything were almost always this boring.
The stockout item is the one with the longest tail. When a product goes out of stock, most stores fall into one of three defaults without ever deciding: leave the page up, redirect it to the category, or delete it. Only the first one keeps the search history that page spent months building, so the other two turn a temporary supply problem into a permanent visibility one.
Thirty seconds, no tools, for anyone reading. Type site: then your domain with no space, then the name of a product you stopped selling last year. If nothing comes back, that page is gone from Google, and the next product you retire will go the same way.
I spent this summer going through 197 online stores in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. The things that actually moved anything were almost always this boring.