Organizing A Backlink Authority Category Page

[nat88han]

I work for a company that has many promotions throughout the year, some big, some HUGE.  Typically they have created a landing page for this content.  The issue is, when this promotion ends, we will kill the landing page, thus 404ing the backlinks and putting the page authority in purgatory.

(1) What would be the best way the keep these pages organized?

I was thinking about creating a main "Promotions" page with the current promotion on it (the previous ones linked on the bottom of the page).  Then when the promotion ends I would copy those contents and add them to a new page and link to it from the original "promotions" page.

An issue I see with this is that the promotions page would always have the same Title Tag and vanity URL. (2) This could provide many links to the "promotions" page over time to build it's authority, but would constantly changing content hurt ranking factors?

[UmarKhan]

Nathan,

I don't think every time copying a content on new pages is a very good idea. I'd do this way,

Create a main landing page for "Promotions" and list all the previous organized campaigns under that. URL structure would be like, ABC.com/Promotions (for main page) and ABC.com/Promotions/Aug-2015-Nike-Campaign(for a campaign). If Nike will come multiple times in a year and a company don't want users to see the previous campaigns, I'd redirect the URL to ABC.com/Promotions/2015-Nike-Campaign when that particular promotion ends.

In this way, I'll preserve all the links and the users will see the short, optimized and simple URL for every campaign.

Hope this helps!

Umar

[Everett]

I typically advise making promotion URLs "evergreen" so you can re-use them. For example, if you know you're going to have a Christmas sale every year don't make the URL /christmas-sale-2015/. Just /christmas-sale/ will do. Then when the promotion is over you can put up messaging saying when they should check back (if it's a regular promotion) and provide a link to your main promotions page. You can just re-use this same page every year and it will gain more and more links over time and become increasingly powerful.

If the promotion is a one-time deal and not something that you do each month, quarter, year... then I would 301 redirect the out-of-date promotions pages to the main promotions landing page. You can update the content on that page regularly and optimize it for things like "sales, discounts, deals, promotions, promos...".