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I have a page containing products on sale.

There are three different sales during a year, most of the times the products stay the same throughout all sale, what changes for each sale is:

  • Title/Name of page
  • Category image and Description of page (might change)
  • Product pricecs

What is best practice here when it comes to the url?

Would it be better to use the same url for all different sales even though the title, description and prices may vary e.g. mysite.com/sale.html

or should I create a url for each type of sale e.g. mysite.com/sale.html, mysite.com/big-sale.html, mysite.com/the-awesome-sale.html

Are there any concenquences to adding a URL and then a couple of months remove it to be replaced by another?

2 Answers 2

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The general rule of thumb is you don't want to change URLs. Changing URLs means links pointing to those pages and bookmarks referencing those pages can break, leading people to an error. From an SEO standpoint, you also lose any authority assigned to that particular URL (like links referencing that URL) if you suddenly remove that URL from your website.

You can get around that with redirects. Typically, though, for best SEO and simpler management, you want those redirects to be permanent (a 301 redirect). In your case it doesn't sound like permanent redirects would make sense as you need to continually have a different URL. You could use temporary redirects as you change the URL, but that could become a management nightmare.

So, what pages do you need - one URL or three for each type of sale? Well, a couple questions for you here:

  1. Do these sales overlap or do they reach run at separate times of the year?
  2. Are the sales being targeted to the same general audience (should the same people see all three sales)?

If the answer to all three is yes, and my guess is that the answers probably are yes, then I'd think you can go with a single sale page. The content of that page changes during the year as the sale changes. That way people know to bookmark and return to this page to see the latest sales.

If the sales overlap and you can't have the same page talk about multiple sales or if the sales are targeted at different groups of people, then maybe you do need to have a separate page for each. In that case, you would want to keep the URL active for each sale, without changing the URL. Instead, you would just change which sale is linked to from elsewhere on your site when a particular sale is active. The inactive sales would still be pages on your site, with a consistent URL, but would not be heavily promoted when the sale is inactive.

The first option, with a single page, is certainly a cleaner way to go and hopefully that makes sense given the audience targeted.

I hope that helps!

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  • I have seen your methods described exist for several major retailers. This means you are spot on! I have gone to sales pages for major retailer that are annual and are over for the year. But it does give the user the opportunity to know about the annual sale and look for it next year.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Sep 11, 2015 at 17:37
  • @closetnoc Yes, for the longevity and future of annual sales and promotions this is key. Very interesting point.
    – dvnkiss
    Commented Sep 11, 2015 at 23:41
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It's not necessary to change the url bt if you want it to change then submit the old url to Google webmaster tool for no indexing by going through https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

If you don't remove your old deleted url then it will show as error 404 because google bots will not stop crawling that url.

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  • Eventually will stop crawling that URL.
    – John Conde
    Commented Sep 20, 2016 at 10:50

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