Can Expired Listings be Marked as 'Sold' and not be Unhidden?

[Noel Bautista]

Edit: I just realized I used a double negative. The thread title should read "Can Expired Listings be Marked as 'Sold' and not be hidden?"

Hello,

I am asking if there's a way for expired listings not to be hidden/closed and just be kept accessible to the public but be marked as 'SOLD' instead?

And the same, once expired or 'Sold' the inventory will not be counted against the seller's balance. This way, the seller has one more inventory available but his old listings will still be available and the site's number of pages will not decrease but will increase in time.

I am thinking in a SEO sense of way. Since once these listings get crawled and listed by the search engines and once browsers/people click on the SERPS and lead them to an 404 (or unavailable) page, then the site will be penalized in an SEO-sort of way.

In the same vein, can we disable sellers from deleting their ads? They can just label it SOLD or let it expire and the system will just mark it as SOLD. Same result: no more inquiries since people will see as 'SOLD'