Old product pages are now Orphan URLs

Development
1

I had an old catalog with way more products than I have now. I deleted the products, however, google still sees the empty product pages and says they are orphan pages since there are no links to them. I do not want to add links since the products are no longer available and the pages are basically an empty product page shell.

any advice on how to eliminate these orphan page errors? I was thinking about 404 or 410 erroring them but wasn’t sure how to go about that either.

2

Is your site linked to the Google Search Console? Then I think there should be ways to tell Google which sites no longer exist. I think Google will also update over time which links it still thinks are valid. Creating an updated sitemap (there’s extras for that) and linking that to the GSC is probably also a good idea.

1 Like
3

That makes sense, I will start there. Thank you very much.

4

The Orphans extra might be useful to you (or not).