What to do with expired holiday pages.

A date tells you when to look at a page. It does not tell you what to do with it. A seasonal page may still answer a question people ask all year, may be needed again in twelve months, or may have no job left at all. Three questions settle most cases: will this page be needed again, does anyone still arrive on it, and is there another page that does exactly the same job?

Answer them honestly and the page lands in one of four places. Writing the answer down, with the reason, is what turns a vague tidy-up into a decision you can repeat next year.

Keep and refresh

The page is still needed, or will be. Keep the address, rewrite anything that was true only for the season, and set a date to look at it again.

Retain as useful archive

The page has no current job but still has readers or links. Keep it, say plainly that it has ended, and point to what is current.

Redirect to a genuinely equivalent page

Another page does the same job for the same visitor. Send the old address there, once, directly.

Review for removal

Nothing keeps the page alive. Check where it is linked, then remove it properly.

Picture a small shop that sells garden lanterns and candles. On 1 November it has three Halloween pages. The glowing-lantern collection sold out on the 31st, but the supplier reopens orders in the summer and the shop will sell it again next October. The pumpkin-lantern guide has 22 known incoming links and is useful in any autumn. A countdown page for a Halloween evening event has no links, no readers and no future.

The collection is due back, so it stays on its address. The shop rewrites the opening to say when it returns, marks the sold-out items, and takes the link out of the main menu until the season comes round. The guide has strong lasting value, so it is kept and its dated lines are rewritten. The countdown page fails every test: it has no value, no links and no equivalent. The shop had thought of pointing it at the home page, but a home page does not do the same job as an event page, so the verdict is review for removal.

Notice that one season produced three different answers. The stock status drove the first, the content drove the second and the links drove the third. That is why a rule based only on the date would have got two of them wrong.

Now take a sale that will not come back: a tenth-anniversary sale with the year in its address, which ended on 30 November. The shop will never run that exact sale again, so a stable address is no use, and nine links from a newsletter archive and a partner blog still arrive at it.

The shop has a general offers page that lists whatever is on sale. It is close, but it is a list, not the anniversary sale, so the honest label is similar rather than equivalent. A redirect would drop visitors on a page that does a different job, and the documentation on moving addresses warns against sending many old pages to one unrelated destination such as the home page. The verdict is retain as archive: a short note that the sale has ended, the date, and a clear route to the current offers.¹

1 Documentation: mapping old addresses to replacements

If the shop had a winter sale page for the same buyers, the answer would change. Marked equivalent, with no loop and no chain, the old address would redirect there. The lesson for next time is to give seasonal pages that return a stable address without the year, so they never reach this decision at all.

The Black Friday page is the opposite case. It is a recurring holiday page, and the shop runs it every November. Search documentation on recurring sales events recommends reusing one stable address rather than creating a different one each year, so the page keeps its history and its links together.²

2 Documentation: recurring sale pages

After 30 November the page does not retire. The countdown goes, the prices that expired go, and the page now says the sale has finished and points to the current winter offers. The shop sets its next review for about two months before the next sale, early October 2027, and uses that visit to put the dates and offers for the year in place. Nothing is redirected, because nothing has moved.

A redirect is a promise that the destination is the same thing in another place. Documentation says to use a permanent redirect when you are sure it will not be reverted, and a temporary one only for short-term situations. It also says server-side redirects are the most reliably understood, with scripts and refresh tags as fallbacks.³

3 Documentation: redirects and search

Keep three rules. Point the old address straight at the final destination, not through a second redirect. Never let two redirects point at each other, because the visitor and the crawler both go round in circles. And do not send a pile of different pages to one unrelated page: a home page is the usual mistake, and it may be treated as an error page rather than as a replacement.⁴

4 Documentation: mapping old addresses to replacements

A redirect is also the one decision that gets made outside your list of pages. It happens in your hosting or site settings, so record it in the plan and test the old address on a phone and a desktop once it is in place.

Some pages should go. The cleanest removal is deleting the page so the address returns a not-found status. Documentation says addresses that return an error status are not kept in the index and are dropped over time. A page that shows a polite apology but still returns a normal status can be treated as a soft error, which is worse than either option.⁵

5 Documentation: status codes and removed pages

If you need a page to stay reachable for visitors but out of search results, a noindex tag does that, and documentation advises against using the robots file to block a page you want removed, because the crawler must be able to read the tag. Before any removal, take the page out of menus, internal links and the sitemap, and decide where the visitors who still arrive from old links will land.⁶

6 Documentation: removing a page from results

Dates make this routine rather than a scramble. Use them as review dates in the plan, not as deadlines to delete things.

• 1 to 7 November. Review the Halloween pages. Most will be kept and refreshed or archived; check stock status first.
• Mid November. Open any redirects you set up and confirm they land on the right page.
• 1 to 7 December. Review the Black Friday pages, starting with anything dated in its address.
• Early October 2027. Revisit the recurring pages before the next season begins.