u/Backslashjones

I recently started helping out with a long-running Shopify store with 8,000+ products. I'd guess half of them or more are out-of-stock and unofficially discontinued, but still marked as Active.

Would you mark these as Unlisted to help protect SEO, or would you just archive them and clean house?

My biggest issue with Unlisted is that they still act like normal products in the backend. They show up in collections, product lists, and general workflows, which keeps the store extremely messy.

These out-of-stock products have been this way for years so I'm not sure any real damage would be done to SEO.

Trying to balance SEO, historical sales data, and actually making backend tasks less tedious. Curious how others would handle it.