How to Optimize E-commerce Sitemaps with 1M+ Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Okay, let’s talk about the out-of-stock products. Out-of-stock products can be treated as soft 404 errors, and there is a huge possibility of being dropped from the search results, according to John Mueller. So we need to do research here. We have two scenarios.

The first scenario is for those products to be permanently out of stock.

Research and ask yourself if those products receive traffic. Do they have backlinks? Do they make money for the business? If the answer is yes, then set a 301 redirection rule to those products to other relevant products, remove them from the sitemap, and remove them completely from the products feed.

If those products do not make any money, have no traffic, or have no backlinks, then set a 410 HTTP status and completely remove them from the sitemap and the product feed.

Under scenario number two, we are going to talk about the temporarily out-of-stock products. Then, in that case, it all comes down to the user experience.

We need a way to ensure that when the user lands on a temporarily out-of-stock product page, the user has a clear meaning that this product will be back in the future. We need to notify the user and let search engines know about the availability of this product.

So, we need to update the schema markup and create internal link blocks where we can list other relevant products so we can keep the user inside our website. Plus, we need to set a clear ‘Notify Me’ button and give the user the option to leave his email so he can receive a notification email saying, “Hey, this product is back in stock. Are you interested in this?”

And, of course, we are going to keep it inside the sitemap.

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