Loaded Commerce Community

I have a number of products which were discontinued and have therefore been deleted in the past, however Google has picked up the product pages and indexed them. Some of these products are now appearing in my Webmaster Tools account as pages which cannot be found.

Is it possible to allocate a new product to a particular ID number? Or do new products automaticall fill the void of product ID numbers?

For example:

Product ID's:

1001 - active product which gets deleted after it is indexed by Google
1002 - active product
1003 - active product
1004 - active product

If I created a new product, I'm assuming the ID number would be 1005? If this is the case, can I change it to be 1001?

Product ids are auto incremental, so yes 1005 would be the next.

Reusing product ids is not just about seo, that old product id could appear in numerous tables (including all product tables, order tables, customer order history, attributes, customer group prices, possibly links ... etc) so changing an old id to me isn't a good idea. If you have old ids your could redirect them using htaccess / 301s.

Simon

Thanks for your response Simon, that makes sense.

Further to this, if I have a product which I never intend to use again, is it best to keep it as inactive or delete the product via the CMS?

Doesn't really matter. Either way if inactive it won't be purchasable right?

Simon