How To Deal With Expired And Outdated Website Content

Content makes a website but in short it can also harm it from an SEO and a visitors perspective

. Keeping track of old content is an overwhelming task for any webmaster especially those dealing with large ecommerce sites, databases and job sites as just a few examples. The result of leaving old content to pile up is a sea of 404 Not Found errors which do your optimisation no favours and put of users who find it frustrating to attempt closer searches for information that is no longer relevant.

Therefore the answer is to form a strategy that deals with expired website content so that things can be kept up to date and fresh.

What actually is outdated or expired content?

Not all content on a website will ever necessarily expire however there are numerous examples of content that was only ever intended to have a limited shelf life. A great example is a job advertisement which when filled will clearly render the original listing obsolete.

Plenty of outdated content will be found on ecommerce websites who may list products that are discontinued or long term out of stock.

Ways of dealing with expired content

404 Errors

This is one of the most commonly used ways of dealing with expired content however it is by no means the best. The main problem begins with the search engines that crawl the site and identify these 404s as being errors which can have an adverse effect on the optimisation. The website is also wasting the crawl time allocated by allowing redundant and useless pages to receive air time so to speak.

Another big downside with 404s is user experience. A website that allows a visitor to click onto a page that comes up with 404 errors is likely to experience a high bounce rate.

However custom 404 pages can be produced that can politely inform the user the page is expired and point them in the right direction whether this is back to the home page or recommending a similar product or service.

Permanent Redirect 301

In most situations a 301 permanent redirect is the best option and can be used to send users to another page in place of expired content. This not only makes for a more pleasant user experience but helps SEO by way of allowing the search engines to see that a site is being well maintained and updated on a regular basis. Also the 301 redirect allows link to be retained that could be valuable juice to the sites overall traffic.

In the case of a 301 redirect the webmaster must ask where they want the redirects to actually direct to. When making this decision one has to decide what makes for the best user experience and what material will be most relevant to redirect to and it is also important to ensure that the page being redirect to is going to be a permanent page itself as it is badSEOpractise to have more than 1 continuous redirects.

One disadvtange of 301 redirects is that they can, on some sites, affect site speed although only in the cases of multiple redirects and a well designed site should help to mitigate this.

by: davidsmith

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