Redirect on No Inventory

On the shopping directory sites I have set up, I'm currently doing a 301 redirect to the home page from the product detail page if the product is no longer in stock.

So if you click on a google link to see a big blue widget, and the widget is out of stock, I'm 301ing you to the home page.

Do you tyink this is the best solution? Or should I show a Sorry out of stock message?

What raised this concern was Yahoo. Yahoo has TON of my product-detail pages indexed, but many of the are for products no longer in stock. With over 450,000 products updated daily, there's a lot of inventory movement.

What do you think is the best solution when someone lands on a product detail page and the product is no longer availaible? If I 301 them to the home page, are they going to be irritated because they didn't get the page they clicked on? Or would they rather see a Sorry out of stock?

 

you could display out of stock you will be directed to our main page in 2 seconds. and then after 2 seconds redirect them to the main page.

 

I thought about that, but that would be a client side redirect and the search engines would still think the product page existed and keep the page indexed. Not a bad thing, I guess, since poeple woould still show up. But because of the inventory turnover, I dont' want the SE indexes to, over time, get cluttered with out of stock inventory pages.

 

Most people wish they had your problem of too many indexed pages.

Will the products be coming back in stock? If so, I think the surfers will appreciate a client side redirect. That or a landing page that offers them related / similar products (no idea how codeable this is)

 

No, even if they comes back ,they will end up with a different identifier in the database. I think I'll just stick with the 301.