I strugled with discontinued products myself and eventually came up with a smooth way of handling discontinued products.
If you are using ASP then use the following. I'm sure the statements for the language you are using can be found pretty easily.
Discontinued products are best handled by making a small change to your product display page.
Determine if the product is discontinued and if so, add the following line before the <html> tag...
<%response.status="404 Not Found"%>
Then instead of a cold 404 page. Simply leave all the usual navigation, headers, footers etc in place and only replace the area where the product would be shown. Use something like the following...
"We were unable to locate the product you requested. This may have been a link from a search engine or a bookmarked page that is out of date."
Lastly, in the case of a product that has been replaced by a newer model, you need to have the replacement product id stored in the database with the listing for the discontinued product.
You should use the following asp code...
<%
newaddress="[URL for newer product]"
response.status="301 Moved Permanently"
response.addheader "Location", newaddress
%>
Then use the following text...
"The product you requested has been replaced by a newer model. Please visit the new page at [URL]."
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