301 a page and then remove the 301

[ChrisKolmar]

I have a real estate website that has a city hub page. All the homes for sale within a city are linked to from this hub page.

Certain small cities may have one home on the market for a month and then not have any homes on the market for months or years. I call them "Ghost Cities". This problem happens across many cities at any point in time. The resulting city hub pages are left with little to no content.

We are throwing around the idea of 301 redirecting these "Ghost City" pages to a page higher up in the hierarchy (Think state or county) until we get new homes for sale in the city. At that point we would remove the 301.

Any thoughts on this strategy? Is it bad to turn 301s on and off like that? Thanks!

[Daylan]

Wouldn't a 302 be a better option? Temporary vs permanent.

[IKT]

In my opinion, i think there is no problem ... But if you want to be on a safe side , why not filled it with useful information instead?

For example : I went to City X Hub Page... when it has absolutely no home at all, i think the visitor would be much more happier when they see certain information like "Duh... no one is selling home in this Ghost City, perhaps you would be interested in properties from nearest city around it such as Show some good home on City Y and City Z "

[ChrisKolmar]

Yea it is definitely a viable option. Just wondering if there would be an added benefit to passing the link juice through a 301, especially if there isn't a penalty for turning it off/on.

[ChrisKolmar]

Playing devil's advocate, should we worry about duplicate content? There would be 100s of pages that all had different titles/h1s, but very similar content (just different nearby cities).

In general, I like this idea.

[IKT]

Supposedly we have 6 cities, City A ~ City F

City A ~ C (3 cities) is a ghost city

We can easily make City A, showed additional results for City D and E, while City B shows additional results for City E and F, and of course City C showed results for City F and City D..

In reality, i think one city is surrounded only by 3 ~ 4 cities right? so there will be no city that will have exactly the same neighborhood

If you want you can even kick the additional listing into overdrive by giving some randomization

For example

http://www.stand-out.net/Movitel-Cuffed-Jeans-pr-7703.html (not my site)

You can see the "More From Humor" Section always randomized 3 more items that has Humor Brand (try refreshing the page to see the randomization)... there is no way that you will ever have a duplicate content this way

Again, dont try to built a page for SEO, but built them for your customer first, you will definitely have a very happy customer if you showed them additional result from nearby cities instead of just BLINDLY redirect them to another city

Good luck

[ReneReinholdt]

We all know that some of the link juice dies with 301's but I suspect that with a 302 you would keep the link juice.