How do retailers phase out short term promotional pages for best SEO?

[mm916157]

I have a high level question and am open to all discussions.

I work for a large ecommerce site and we are always making new landing pages, product assortments and promotions.

We have a challenge on how to retire these pages after a promotion is outdated.

What is this the MOZ community option on a way to retire, like 301 redirect to home page?

[JaneCopland]

The guys all have some great thoughts here.

One more thought:

If a promotion or product is usually short-lived but comes back intermittently (e.g. once a year, twice a year, etc.), the URL can be kept live. A good example is rental real estate in a big city - the properties will come back on the market, but the URLs need to show visitors that the apartment is not available at the moment. RIghtmove (real estate in the UK) does this with rentals it knows will come back on the market, e.g. http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-21907128.html

They re-use the pages when the property is live again - I've seen them do it with both flats I lived in, and they rank remarkably well. Questionable usability if a page ranks and is actually unavailable, but effective.

Clearly this is only relevant if you will re-use / open these short-term promotions in the future.

[Kingof5]

I'm in ecommerce as well. We 301 promotion-specific pages to the homepage once the promotion is over, as each one won't come back around for a year.

[znotes]

Yeah if you can determine a set schedule, with no overlap, I would try to aggregate promotions onto a common URL.

For instance, we host local events in Brooklyn, for which the content becomes obsolete once the event is over. We maintain one URL for our events:

http://www.uncommongoods.com/designs/events

And simply rotate the content. That way the links to the page help build more specific authority for "design events". If we were to 301 redirect content to the HP, we'd lose this niche.

[WilliamKammer]

It depends on how quick the promotions are. If the promotions really are short-term, I like to create a "specials" or "promotions" page where they can all be aggregated along with some unique content. Pages like that can get crazy traffic and even links. Visitors love them.

Then, you can have those individual promotions pages branch off of that main one. 301s to the promotions page would work. Or, if possible, maybe creating brand new pages for each promotion isn't the right way to go about it, and those promotions should ONLY live on the main promotions page.