SEO optimization for an online store: organizing products after sale

[sumaiyakhatun27]

During a lecture on the SEO course, one of the students posed an interesting problem to Artem Kolomiyets , Head of SEO at Webpromo, the course curator and lecturer. However, in order not to waste time during the lesson, we decided to solve it separately and share different answer options.

The essence of the task
There is a website that specializes in selling clothing both wholesale and retail. Every week, 50-100 new items are added to it, which sell out quickly.

From the very beginning of the project, a problem arose: the large amount of space required to store product photos due to the constant addition of pages.

The developers have added a feature to the site that allows you to automatically delete unnecessary files when a product is no longer for sale.

The thing is that clothing from manufacturers becomes irrelevant on the site due to the india rcs data constant release of new models.

But how does this relate to SEO? It's very simple! When we create a new page, it is indexed. But, if we delete a page, it gets a 404 status (page not found). A large number of such errors can negatively affect the site's ranking in search engines.

What to do?
First of all, you need to index the product category, but it is not necessary to close the product card pages from the index. Let them remain available for indexing, since there is a potential sale opportunity.

The only thing that needs to be resolved is the issue of goods that have already been sold. There are several options:

Create an archive and move product cards there. Set noindex and nofollow for archive pages. This will avoid product duplication, but the weight will remain on closed pages.
Apply a 301 redirect from a product that is no longer available to the appropriate category. This will redistribute weight, but may create a 404 error. This option works, but requires caution.
Another option is to apply a canonical tag to the category with the out-of-stock product. This way, the weight will be redistributed, but without a redirect.
Leave the product on the site, but add micro-markup for the products and indicate that the product is no longer available for sale. These products can also be archived, but without using noindex.
Implement a 404 error and remove the link to the relevant product. However, this approach will negatively impact SEO and is not desirable.