Sold and Unavailable Item Status Display

Greetings,

I am seeking a little input on a problem I am facing in regards to marking items as sold or unavailable. What I am trying to figure out is when marking an item as sold, it no longer shows on the homepage or widgets, etc. However, I would like the item to still be accessible so it is still indexed by the search engines. The only option available, is hide expired listing… which in turn removed the listing from the website entirely. I don’t want that necessarily… One of the issues is when marking an item sold, it still shows on the homepage like a regular item with just a small notice at the top saying it was sold. But, it still shows up in the widgets… Is there a way to filter those out from the widgets? But still have them accessible in the website marked as sold?

Alternatively, would creating an archive or a separate category for sold items be plausible? However, changing the category will change the link to that particular item and it would be a dead link in search engine queries which is not good… unless of-course the link could be forwarded to the proper item.

Unlike most classifieds sites, I run mine a little different… mine is more focused on me listing my items for sale rather than allowing people to register and add the listings. I do offer my customers to capability to add their items to the website, but thats not my focus. I buy and sell equipment, so I want to merely post items up myself for the most part. and the items that do get sold, I want to be able to mark them as sold, but still have them accessible but not in-front of items that are still available. The major issue is, when customers have to scroll through dozens of sold items, in seek of something that is still available.

Any input would be appreciated.