Do Out Of Stock Products Impact Search Visibility?

When you\’re running an HVAC business, not only do you sell your services, but you may have your hand into selling products as well. If that\’s the case, you will have undoubtedly had times where you\’ve gone out of stock of a particular item. If you\’re selling items online, and you\’re experiencing this, there\’s a chance that that product page might see worse rankings in the search engines, like Google.

It seems that Google would potentially reduce the visibility of a product page if the item for sale is listed as out of stock.

According to John Mueller, the possibility of items being out of stock does see a reduced visibility:

“Out of stock – it’s possible. That’s kind of simplified like that. I think there are multiple things that come into play when it comes to products themselves in that they can be shown as a normal search result.

They can also be shown as an organic shopping result as well. If something is out of stock, I believe the organic shopping result might not be shown – I’m not 100% sure.

And when it comes to the normal search results, it can happen that we when see that something is out of stock, we will assume it’s more like a soft 404 error, where we will drop that URL from the search results as well.

Theoretically, it could affect the visibility in search if something goes out of stock.”

But, if the product page also contains information that is deemed useful, regardless of the stock status of the product itself, then there is a good chance that that page will retain its visibility in search results.

Mueller continues:

“It doesn’t have to be the case. In particular, if you have a lot of information about that product anyway on those pages, then that page can still be quite relevant for people who are searching for a specific product. So it’s not necessarily that something goes out of stock, and that page disappears from search.”

You can check out the full response here by John Mueller in the following video: