Google's Advice on How to Handle Out of Stock Products
If you are running an ecommerce site then you run into out of stock products on a regular basis. There are a lot of ways to handle this situation and like all processes it's smart to revisit what you're doing and why. Check out Google's advice on how to handle product pages for items that are out of stock temporarily or no longer available.
Small sized site, which sells one-of-a-kind artisanal products and has perhaps 10-20 product pages. (for example: a handmade furniture manufacturer).
Recommendation - take the time to suggest similar products the customer may be interested in that are available.
Medium sized site, which has hundreds to thousands of product pages.
Recommendation - Do a 404 for unavailable products; or if the product is temporarily out of stock -- be clear when the product will be available again.
Large sized site, which has millions of product pages (for example: Craigslist).
Recommendation - Use the 'unavailable after' meta tag. This meta tag tells Google to exclude this page from the search results after the marked date.
