Temporary landing pages and SEO

[lhernandezBum]

Hi guys! I have a question that has been running through my mind for quite a while now.

On our company, we offer different products that we put on specific landing pages (one per product). This products are "live" on a 20 day period.

Right now, when the product expires, we put a label "This product expired" and return a 404.

Is this the right way to do it? Take into account that keeping the page "alive" is not an option. The options would be:

• 301 redirecting to another listing (should I worry about this implementation being wrong? Wouldn't Google find it suspicous that lots of pages redirect to the same listing?)

• Return a 200 instead

Thanks for your time!

[irvingw]

I would 301 them to the homepage or if you have a main directory landing page that lists all of the offers. You don't want to 301 them to the closest landing page offer because that one too will have a limited life and you'll wind up daisy chaining redirects. Google has no problem with a site having a lot of 301's.

[lhernandezBum]

How about 301 redirecting to the main product listing with some sort of extra parameter on the URL (?productExpired, for example) that triggers a message like "The product you are looking for expired, check these"?

Of course, then I would add a canonical on the page with the ?productExpired.

Does this make sense?

[CleverPhD]

I have to digress on 301s and then bring up soft 404s

You have to watch about sending too many 301s to a single page.  Sometimes you have to do this, but I have also seen Google showing soft 404 errors when you have a bunch of many paged 301ing to a single page on sites we manage.

There is a subtle thing we have found on how Google thinks about 301s as it relates to 404s

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/crawl-errors-now-reports-soft-404s.html

They state that to correct soft 404s one thing you should look at is 2.b "Should redirect to a more accurate URL"

Google prefers that a 301 is more of a one-to-one or several to one.

There was also a post in SEOmoz on this

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

If you send too many 301s to a single page - like the home page, this may look like you are trying to manipulate link juice.

I would be so bold as to say Google prefers a one to one relationship for 301s vs a many to one.

Options

1. If you want to just get rid of pages already in the index

After 20 days, show a 200 on the page, update the message to say that this product is no longer available with a link to your search page but then add the noindex meta tag to that page.  This will allow Google to spider, but remove the page from the index.   You would also need to remove all links on your site to this page after 20 days as well.

Leave up the page for 6 months - 1 year and then setup a 404 as the page is dead and out of the Google index and the 20 day deal has been long gone.

This will get those pages out of the index, tell users where they need to go in case they land on the page and minimize any 404 or soft 404 errors in Google webmaster tools.

2. Keep them out of the index to start with

I am assuming that since these pages are only up for 20 days, they do not have time to really gain any search traction to start with and so would not show up in the SERPs (or rank that high if they did).

If that is the case, why not put all these pages in a separate folder that you block with robots.txt and then no follow all links to them.  Keep them out of the index to start with.

Sounds like you are optimizing a category type page above the product pages anyway and so you just focus on optimizing the category page vs the product pages themselves.

Beyond that, would need more specifics on the how and the why of what you are doing to try and figure out the if and the when of next steps

[irvingw]

That is really good advice, i think the missing piece that we don't know in order to recommend the best approach is how much are these landing pages promoted on the web and are people linking to them. It all comes down to whether you are throwing away PR or not.

If a LP has good links pointing to it i would 301 it, if the LP has only a couple of links pointing to it, the slow 200 then 404 is a good approach.

"if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there does it make a sound?"

"if a page 404's and no one is linking to it, does it 404"

in other words, if there is no internal linking to the LP on your site and no one is linking to it and it is not in your sitemap xml files then you can simply remove the URL in WMT and Google will not report it as a 404.

[CleverPhD]

Agreed!  Like with anything the answer is, "Well, it depends."