Reinstate 'Display Out Of Stock Products' Options

I used to be that you had a selection of options on how to display out of stock products. This meant you could hide OOSs on the category page but still have them accessible through a direct search in e.g Google. This meant extra listings in Google, use of 'Related products' and 'Back in Stock' emails etc.

This has been removed so now it's all or nothing. If you don't display OOSs on your category page (which I don't want to do) they also don't link in any Google search, it comes up with a 'Can't find this page' error. So you lose all of the above and I think lose custom.

I have tried explaining this to Support but they just keep saying to get Google to recrawl so they are taken out of the listings. They seem (wilfully) to keep misunderstanding that I want OOS product to be found by Google because of the benefits as listed above.