Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Kate I work with a lot of eCommerce companies and when a category is essentially in limbo - between seasons where stock may be re-bought then I keep it live. To simply redirect to another unrelated page is not, in my opinion the best result for the customer. If a customer is searching for Levis (just an example) and you don't have any then why would he want to end up on a  generic Jeans page or another brand? The best result is that they see you are out of stock. You could even just put a message on that page saying - Sold Out - stock arriving soon or something like that. (Get the buying plans off the buyers! - they know what is on order for the next 6-9 months!) The page will remain and get repopulated once stock arrives. If the category is simply out of stock never to return then I would consider redirecting to a higher category - but if it was a brand I may still leave the page as being sold out. (The alternative here is to allow it to 404 so the page disappears all together from SERPs - but then style your 404 page so that they can follow a menu of alternatives). The last thing you want is a potential customer going round in circles trying to find the brand because you have redirect them somewhere else. So a message like 'We are out of stock of Levis right now but check out these other awesome brands - with a menu' is perfectly fine and a better User Experience (UX) By creating the best UX you are far more likely to please your buyers and frankly a few pages of skinny content is not going to kill you in SERPS - you have a perfectly valid reason. Watch Rand's video on alternative methods but I would do this. Regards Nigel

Hey Kate, It's great that you've started thinking about optimizing your content for Christmas now in summer. It really takes time. Regarding your question, I'd prepare a separate page for "C_hristmas gifts for Mum" w_ith optimized content. Then I would start a link building campaign for that page through relevant anchor texts including the "Christmas KWs". This should boost the rankings for your page. I wouldn't be worried about relevancy too much. As said, it takes time and Google will see that you're prepared. You'll have time to get some stats for your page as well. Looking forward to some other opinions in the discussion. Cheers, Martin