How to best handle expired content?
-
Similar to the eBay situation with "expired" content, what is the best way to approach this?
Here are a few examples.
With an e-commerce site, for a seasonal category of "Christmas" .. what's the best way to handle this category page after it's no longer valid? 404? 301? leave it as-is and date it by year?
Another example. If I have an RSS feed of videos from a big provider, say Vevo, what happens when Vevo tells me to "expire" a video that it's no longer available?
Thank you!
-
As Jeff pointed out, with something like a Christmas category page, you'll want to leave it up so that you can use it easily next year (and maintain any links associated with the page). You can easily remove navigation links to the page during the off season and add them in in the months leading up to the season so that you're again passing internal link equity to the pages.
Regarding the RSS feed content, I'd probably 301 it to a related video or to a relevant category page, though you could make a case for leaving it up, saying that the content is no longer available and providing related videos for the user to navigate to.
-
Jonathan -
Great question… There's a great Moz article from April 2012 about how to handle expired content.
http://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-contentIn a nutshell, the author says that there isn't one solution for all situations. But the lens that they give is to figure out what is going to create the best user experience.
The author's advice:
For the vast majority of scenarios, I'd suggest 301 redirecting your expired content to another page. This is usually the best option for SEO and can also be customized to enhance the user experience via dynamically-generated messages. For instance, if a product page had garnered external links, you're able to retain most of the link equity from those links via a 301 redirect (whereas with a 404, that link equity is lost). Why would you want to lose the link equity that you had worked so hard to obtain? Furthermore, it demonstrates to search engines that your site is well-maintained and up-to-date or "fresh".However, for seasonal items, it's recommended that you leave the pages on the site year-round:
If a product is seasonal, such as the case for fashion products (example: swimsuits), you might want to leave the page on the site permanently… And if you don't want the page to be indexed in the off-season, add a meta tag to noindex/follow the page.
Hope this helps!
- Jeff
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Which URL should I choose when combining content?
I am combining content from two similar articles into one. URL 1 has a featured snippet and better URL structure, but only 5,000 page views in the last 6 month, and has 39 keywords ranking in the top 10. URL 2 has worse structure, but over 100k page views in the last 6 months, and 236 keywords in the top 10. Basically, I'm wondering if I keep the one with the better URL structure or the one with more traffic. The deleted URL will be redirected to whichever I keep.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | curtis-yakketyyak0 -
Best way to handle deletion of a forum subdomain?
Hello All Our site www.xxxx.com has long had a forum subdomain forum.xxxx.com. We have decided to sunset the forum. We find that the 'Ask a Question' function on product pages and our social media presence are more effective ways of answering customers' product & project technical Qs. Simply shutting down the forum server is going to return thousands of 404s for forum.xxxx.com, which I can't imagine would be helpful for the SEO of www.xxxx.com even though my understanding is that subdomains are sort of handled differently than the main site. We really tremendously on natural search traffic for www.xxxx.com, so I am loathe to make any moves that would hurt us. I was thinking we should just keep the forum server up but return 410s for everything on it, including the roughly ~3,000 indexed pages until they are removed from the index, then shut it down. The IT team also gave the option of simply pointing the URL to our main URL, which sorta scares me because it would then 200 and return the same experience hitting it from forum.xxxx.com as www.xxxx.com, which sounds like a very bad idea. (Yes, we do have canonicals on www.xxxx.com). In your opinion, what is the best way to handle this matter? Thank You
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamestown0 -
What is best practise for markup in a nav bar, avoid duplicate content.
I'm wondering what's best practise for markup in the nav bar. So if we have <nav> Can we have headers in there, does it help? If we do, would a H1 confuse google as to wether that is the H1 of importance of the one in thein the </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup0 -
Best way to move the content to a different domain without inviting any SERP penalty?
Hi all, We are in a bit of a fix right now. We have around 60-70 articles (Wordpress pages / posts) that we intend to move to another domain of ours. What's the best way to do so such that we do not invite any Google penalty. Here's a detailed information about our case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stj
Let's say, our site example.com has more 2000 articles. To help us better position our content for one of the sections on example.com, we have started another website, example2.com and want to move those 60-70 articles from example.com to example2.com. What is the best way to do it such that we are not penalised by Google? Is it (a) Move all the said content (60-70 articles) from example.com to example2.com and (b) do a permanent redirect (301) of each of the older article URLs to newer article URLs. What are the other options?0 -
Best Practices
Okay this would be a piece of cake for most of you out there.. What are the best practices once you add a page or piece of content on your website with a new keyword that you have never used before but plan to use it with every relevant new page you add. How do you ensure that Google will crawl that page? Secondly, if you add the new keyword in the old pieces of content/ pages you have already published by editing the content to suit that keyword, how would you ensure that it gets crawled my Google. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LaythDajani0 -
Need help with duplicate content. Same content; different locations.
We have 2 sites that will have duplicate content (e.g., one company that sells the same products under two different brand names for legal reasons). The two companies are in different geographical areas, but the client will put the same content on each page because they're the same product. What is the best way to handle this? Thanks a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rocket.Fuel0 -
Best way to geo redirect
Hi I have a couple of ecommerce websites which have both a UK and USA store. At the moment I have both the UK and the USA domains sending me traffic from UK and USA search engines which means that a number of users are clicking a Google page for the store not in their location, ie UK people are clicking on a .com listing and ending up on the USA website. What is the best way to automatically redirect people to the correct store for their region? If I use an IP based auto redirect system would Google see some of the pages are doorway pages? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Best SEO format for a blog page on an ecommerce website.. inc Source Ordered Content
Does anyone know of a page template or code I might want to base a blog on as part of an eccomerce website? I am interested in keeping the look (includes) of the website and paying attention to Source Ordered Content helping crawlers index the new great blogs we have to share. I could just knock up a page with a template from the site but I would like to investigate SOC at this stage as it may benefit us in the long run. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0