Deleted products: discontinued product or brand - Best practice?

I have a product brand (the entire brand) is discontinued. To avoid orders I hastily deleted the products but now I'm getting redirect and broken link errors in google webmaster for those products. I'm guessing since they were previously indexed. So what is the best practice for discontinuing products/brands/manufacturers and what can I do now that I've already deleted the products? I have a backup from before I deleted them so all options are still possible assuming I could merge and not loose current "future" entries. Thanks in advance.

The best practice is to re-use the pages if possible for similar products and if not delete them so the search engines get a proper 404 and remove them from their indexes.

~Melanie

mprough:

The best practice is to re-use the pages if possible for similar products and if not delete them so the search engines get a proper 404 and remove them from their indexes.

~Melanie

Thanks Melanie. So I had done that (deleted because I don't have replacement). ZC is giving a 404 but I guess google is just being google

Google de-lists 404 pages after a period of time. They don't remove them immediately in case the issue is just a temporary server problem.

I have never been entirely satisfied with how this is handled. You can read a discussion about some proposed alternatives in this thread:

https://github.com/zencart/zencart/issues/1699

swguy:

I have never been entirely satisfied with how this is handled. You can read a discussion about some proposed alternatives in this thread:

https://github.com/zencart/zencart/issues/1699

Agreed it's been an issue for many years.

The BIGGEST problem is Google reporting a 404 as an error... which technically it is. However, through webmaster's tools they lead the website owner to believe that something is wrong causing this super serious 404 error. Google should use better language letting webmasters know it's ok and appropriate if the page is "really" gone forever.

~Melanie