What to do with old conversion pages

[Bill_King]

Hey folks! I have a ton of old conversion pages from past trade shows, old webinars, etc that are either getting no traffic or very little. Wondering if I should just 404 them out? Here's an example:

http://marketing.avidxchange.com/rent-manager-user-conference-demo-request-2015

For the pages getting traffic (from PPC, referral links, organic) my presumption is to keep those. The only problem is we have multiple instances of the same asset (prior marketers would just clone them for different campaigns), so in those cases should I 301 them to one version?

Looking for advice on best practices here for future instances. Such as future trade shows, after we use the conversion pages at an event, should I just delete/404 them? Cleaning up old pages should I just delete/404? They don't have any value really and they're annoying to have hanging around. Thanks!

[FedeEinhorn]

If the event has already passed, and as you say there's no longer any value on those pages, you can just delete them. Or a good option would be to 301 them to a page that explains why the page is no longer available and offer the user other related pages that he could might be interested in.

Hope that helps.

[Bill_King]

Thanks Federico! Follow up questions is that we have the ability to "expire" these landing pages. Here's the help article explaining these. Do you suggest taking this route? I'm thinking maybe only the pages that get links we should do this for?

I'm thinking no and just delete them for a variety of reasons but here's the major ones:

-All of our marketing platform hosted content (blog, email, landing pages) roll up to one subodomain - marketing.avidxchange.com. I'd hate to have these thing pages lying around and taking all the authority that we would rather pass onto the blog.
-It's just generally annoying to have a ton of expired content lying around in our CMS. We have a group of 4 in there every day.

[FedeEinhorn]

If you delete the page, and it had links pointing to it, the server will return a 404 not found page, which makes you lose any authority they had to pass to the main domain or subdomain.

Using the 301 redirects at least you take a portion of the authority back to your Website. If your CMS is somehow advanced, it should be easy to hide those "expired pages" from the page list avoiding any confusion.

But again, if you redirect the page, lets say about am  inbound marketing conference in Boston to the main domain that does not "serve" any kind of useful content to the user that was actually expecting the page of the Boston conference, that won't help at all. Instead, try to 301 them to something that the user may be interested in, even tho the event he was looking for is no longer available; in this case, it could be a page listing all the upcoming inbound marketing conferences (in/near Boston). By going that route you favor your site by making the pagerank flow to the other page and you also help the user, which is the primary target.