Temporary landing pages

[pheavey]

Our company routinely has external banner ad campaigns in which the banners link to a temporary promotional landing page; the landing page then links to the page that starts the conversion process. The campaigns usually last for several months, but eventually the pages "come down." My arguments against this practice are 1) we're starting the potential customer one click further away from the conversion than we want them to be, and 2) any SEO "value" that would be gained from the page would be lost (even if we did a 301 redirect, there would be no external links into the landing page after the campaign is over, so the SE's wouldn't "transfer" the value of the landing page).

Thoughts?

Thanks!

[catanich]

This is a common tactic in SEO. But do not make it a "temporary" page. If you do, then it is against the rules. Just leave it there. with a link from the home page to it and a link back to the home page.

As the traffic hits this page, the SEs count this. If this page is SEOed for a Keyword, then you will get an advantage in the SERPs.

Once the campaign is over, this page will obtain a good PR value that can be then used for links, SEOed page, etc.

Just never remove a page. Reuse it and it's history for another purpose.

[pheavey]

Thanks for your input, but "reusing" an old promotional page doesn't make sense for us - we already have product pages (we're a bank, but they're still products) devoted to the "subject" of the promotional page. If we kept the promotional page up, we'd first have to remove all of the promotional aspects to it, and we'd wind up with two pages about the same thing and would compete with ourselves for value for those keywords. And, as noted in my original post, a 301 won't work, either.