Will my discontinued products still appear in search results?
The WooCommerce Discontinued Products plugin is designed to let you make certain products inactive without losing their SEO value.
You can use the plugin to hide discontinued products from your store, so that they no longer appear in your product listings or in the onsite WordPress or WooCommerce search results. However, it intentionally does not hide the products from search engines. This is because the product pages for your discontinued items still have SEO value which you may not want to lose.
Even though a product is discontinued, you can still use it as an opportunity to improve your search engine rankings and get new customers. Check out our tips on how to do this.
If you would prefer to hide discontinued products from search engines, then here is our advice on how to do it without damaging your SEO:
- Use your WordPress SEO plugin (e.g. Yoast) to mark each discontinued product as 'noindex'.
- Use a free plugin such as Redirection to redirect your discontinued product pages to the shop page, a relevant category page, or an alternative product.