What should sites do with pages for products that are no longer available?
Why Webmasters Stack Exchange recommends it
Webmasters Stack Exchange answerers point people to it as Google's own guidance on handling discontinued product pages, 404s and redirects for out-of-stock or expired listings.
Recommended by 2 people across 3 different months, 2014 to 2016.
What it is
A short Google Search Central video in the Webmaster Help series where Matt Cutts answers a viewer question about how e-commerce sites should treat product pages for items that are no longer available. It covers keeping, redirecting or removing such pages, and how the answer shifts when discontinued products outnumber active ones.
What people said
Recommends Max · 2014-04 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “How to tell Google my content will expire after a certain period?”
There is a meta tag called unavailable_after [LINK] , which will allow you to tell Google that a page should expire from the search results at a specific date and time. e.g: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="unavailable_after: 25-Aug-2007 15:00:00 EST"> The tag should be added within the section of the pages source code. This information is treated as a removal request: it will take about a day after the removal date passes for the page to disappear from the search results. Google currently only support unavailable_after for web search results. You can see a recent video [this video] where Google's head of webspam, Matt Cutts, suggests using this on ecommerce sites that have many pages that will of
Recommends Max · 2014-10 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “SEO issues with categories which are frequently empty”
Google offers a few different guidelines in this situation. If you are quite a small site, that may not have too many of these types of pages, it's perfectly acceptable to go with your 2 option. Not making the page a 404, but using the page to indicate other related products the customer might be interested in. However if you have more products that are likely to go out of stock more often then you should be removing the pages they should return a 404 page not found status. View the video below from Google, then ask yourself which one of the options your site falls under: What should sites do with pages for products that are no longer available? [this video]
Recommends Matt Sells · 2015-02 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Frequently deleting URLs, bad for SEO?”
Frequently deleting URLs, bad for SEO? The answer could be yes or no. If you had long standing pages that have acquired a lot of authority, yes. It would be very bad to let them 404. Those pages should be 301 redirected to another corresponding page on your website to keep that authority on your website. IN YOUR CASE: Similar to ecommerce You can 404 and your site will be healthy You can show "related" offers Either one is fine. UNLESS the first paragraph of my writing is true to you. Watch this video. It back up what I am saying. It is Matt Cutt's from Google explaining it. [this video]
Cites Goyllo · 2016-08 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “301 Redirects for Property Listing Website”
You should not use 301 redirect in your situation. 301 Redirect helpful when you moved same content to other permalink. I never recommend to use 301 to display relative product or property, instead you can write that, this property is sold out or something else, which gives better experience in my eyes. Checkout amazon website, they use same content, they just change option from available to sold out when they have no product, so you don't need use noindex tag either. 301 redirect is equal to 1 webpage with 1 link, both pass same pagerank, as far I understand. So better to provide useful information to user. Just think yourself, if someone redirect you to some other webpage which you have no