We have seen Google give official advice on how you should handle out of stock products on your web site. But what about products that you sell that are one-of-a-kind, made unique, made once, and sold to one person. What do you do there?

First, the official advice comes from Matt Cutts in 2014 where he said:

Really small sites can show related products on a product page that is out of stock
A medium site needs to 404 the page that is out of stock or if it is temporarily out of stock, communicate when it comes back
Huge sites should use a meta unavailable_after tag to automate this process when you know the product will go out of stock, such as craigslist.

But Mihai Aperghis asked a slightly different question to Google about this. What about the one of a kind product that is made and sold once. But the client wants to showcase these products that were already sold and never to be made exactly again to future customers. What do you do there? John Mueller’s advice seems to move those pages into some sort of gallery archive where the user interface changes and it no longer shows the purchase product type of page anymore.

The question was asked at 7:01 mark and the conversation goes on for a while, almost 10 minutes long. The question was:

John responded:

He goes on to explain that these types of “pages that are kind of low quality-ish and that don’t tend to attract a lot of attention” and maybe can impact the rest of the site? So moving them to a new section, an archive or gallery section can work out for you. You don’t want Google to soft 404 pages you want to come up in search or image search, so this is a way to do that he said.

He goes on to caution keeping the pages live in the product sections where it says out of stock and even when it directs shoppers to alternative and similar options. He said he “is kind of cautious about the the approach overall.”

It is worth listening to, here is the embed:

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.