During a hangout Question and Answer segment, one SEO professional submitted a question to John about expanding their pages with more up-to-date topics on seasonal topics and events.
Their main question was: what do they do with such pieces of content when the season or event, such as Black Friday, is over?
Should they just leave sections on the page permanently?
Or do they want to remove them after the event and add them again next year?
John answered that from Google’s side, it’s entirely up to you how to deal with this. Keeping the pages there is fine.
Also, removing them after a while is fine. If they’re no longer relevant, what you will likely see is that traffic to these pages will be down when it’s not the actual season.
If people are not looking for Black Friday, then they’re not going to find your Black Friday pages.
Then it doesn’t really matter if you have the page or not, because you’re not missing out on any impressions there.
If you make a page noindex, or if you make it 404 for a while and then bring it back later, that’s fine.
The one thing he would watch for with seasonal pages is that you reuse the same URLs year after year.
Instead of having a page that’s called Black Friday 2021, and then Black Friday 2022, just have a page called Black Friday.
This way, if you reuse that page, all the signals that you have associated with that page over the years will continue to work in your favor, rather than you having to build up new signals every year for seasonal events.
This happens at approximately the 37:36 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 37:36
We would like to expand existing pages with more up-to-date content, for example, on seasonal topics and events.
What do we do with such pieces of content when the seasonal event, like Black Friday, is over? Should we just leave sections on the page permanently?
Or move them after the event and add them again next year?
John (Answer) 37:57
Yeah, I, I think from our side, it’s totally up to you how you deal with this. Kind of keeping the pages there is fine. Removing them after a while is fine, if they’re no longer relevant. Essentially, what you would probably see overall is that traffic to these pages will go down, when it’s not seasonal.
And if people are not looking for Black Friday, then they’re not going to find your Black Friday pages. And then it doesn’t really matter if you have that page or not, because you’re not missing out on any impressions there. And if you make this page noindex, or if you make it 404 for a while and then bring it back later, that’s essentially perfectly fine.
The one thing I would watch out for with seasonal pages is that you reuse the same URLs year after year. So instead of having a page that is called Black Friday 2021, and then Black Friday 2022, just have a page called Black Friday.
And that way, if you reuse that page, all the signals that you have associated with that page over the years will kind of continue to work in your favor, rather than you having to build up new signals every year for a seasonal event like this.
So that’s kind of the main recommendation I have there. If you delete these pages when you don’t need them and just kind of recreate the same URL later. Or if you keep those pages live for a longer period of time. I think both of those are essentially perfectly fine. And especially about some kind of competitive, seasonal events like Black Friday, or maybe Christmas or I don’t know, other holidays.
It is something where I tend to see sites create those pages a little bit ahead of time, even if they don’t have a lot of content to share there yet, just so that they can start kind of building up some signals for those pages.
And that could be with regards to internal links and external links, kind of marketing efforts or whatever. Just kind of by having those pages a little bit ahead of time, even if you don’t have a lot of content on them, it’s a little bit easier to kind of be there when it is suddenly season.
