Best practice for a website where the publications (catalogues) expire frequently

[commissionshare]

Hi guys,

Hope to find some smart SEOs around here and where I can to contribute to the community!

I wanted to share an issue we are having with our website, which is focused on the promotional flyers of the supermarket chains. These are often valid for a short period of time and then expire. So it makes no sense to keep them but also, if we delete them, that would create a lot of 404s or something.

So how do you think it is the best way to go around this problem? should we delete them? or when deleted to redirect the dead pages to the homepage? or keep them in an archive live site.com/brand/archive/ ?

Thank you so much for any opinions, much appreciated!

Best

[anthonydnelson]

Hi-

This is a common problem for many websites, think Job Postings or Real Estate.

There are a few ways to handle it, and you have to decide what is best for your business. As of now, it sounds as if each flier is living on it's own unique URL on your site. Here are the scenarios for that set-up.

• Create a unique page for each weeks flyer, let them 404 when removed
• Create a unique page for each weeks flyer, archive them
• Create a unique page for each weeks flyer, redirect all back to parent subcategory/store page
• Create a unique page for each weeks flyer, selectively redirect pages to subcategory/store page if you know there are external links pointing at it

What I wonder is if you could just update the content and keep the URL the same.

website.com/store-name/weekly-flier

This would allow you to continuously build links to the same page and build it's authority and ranking ability over time. You could still choose to archive it if you wanted, but I wonder if that would have value for any of your users.

[bradwayland]

I think this assessment is spot on.  I think the superior strategy would what you mentioned at the end.  If you updated the content continuously I believe you would create the most value for the user.

[crackingmedia]

I think Anthony's idea on this is a good one and would be worth considering. I guess it depends on how many of these you have rotating at any one time and how many URLs you therefore have to maintain.

My thought on it would be to create a custom 404 page for your site that is a more pleasant landing page than regular 404 pages are. It could provide a nice apology that the content the link took them the person to is no longer available and show a number of anchored links for where the visitor may like to go to next, e.g. where to view other promotional flyers or other pages on the site which may be important to the visitor.

By doing that you provide a better visitor experience. Here are the recommendations from Moz's page on HTTP status codes. I think these make a lot of sense:

----------------------------- When visitors reach 404 pages, they should be given navigational options so they do not leave the given site. Web optimized 404 errors pages should contain:

• notification that the user has reached a page that does not exist
• a search box
• a easy to understand navigation system so the user can potentially find what they were orginally looking to access
• a link to the home page

-----------------------------

I hope that helps,
Peter