Related items?

Thanks for reaching out. Let me answer each of your queries –

Will the discontinued product show up in related items on the product pages?

Actually there are 2 types of related item widgets on the product page. I’m not sure which widget are you exactly talking about. So, I’ll reply for both of these widgets.

For the default “Related products” widget, it won’t show up if you have the latest version of the plugin. Products in the “Related products” are setup automatically by WooCommerce, so we have taken care of removing discontinued products from that widget.

The other widget is “You may also like…” which shows products based that you have set under Linked Products (UpSells & Cross-sells) option in the product page. Those will have to be removed manually. In case if you are finding it difficult to remove it manually, you can use our other plugin Bulk Edit UpSells and Cross-sells for WooCommerce to
update those products quickly.

I only want the discontinued products to show up in Google search, but not something people will find on the site if they are looking. Is that possible?

Google will not list your product page (or any page for that matter) in search results if it doesn’t exists on your site. If you remove that page, then Google will automatically remove that page from it’s search results. What our plugin does is that it allows you to mark a product as discontinued, so that your customers cannot buy the product, understand that it is discontinued and can be guided to other products or newer version of the same product. This allows you to not lose out on the SEO Traffic / SEO Juice which the product page holds and allows you to redirect the users to other products on the site. So, to answer your question, what you’re trying to accomplish is technically not possible.

Yes, the discontinued product will appear in Google search, which is what I want.

I don’t want the discontinued product showing up in an onsite search. I believe that is possible, right?

This plugin cannot control control Google’s search results. Also, we are not removing the discontinued products pages. All we are trying to do here is to restrict people from buying it, allow visitors to know the product has been discontinued and giving you options to provide a link to other products if you want to. That’s it. What you are asking for is not in the scope of our plugin.