What do you do with outdated news and articles?

[BeTheBoss]

What do you guys do with your old content/news/articles?

Do you just leave them on your site forever for historical reasons?

It goes without saying that you wouldn't delete an article that has links pointing to it. But if there aren't any links, it doesn't rank and it doesn't receive traffic… do you just scrap it?

How say you?

Update:

I would also like to throw in that I have a client who in 2006/2007 used content from another site. What would you do with that content after this amount of time? Bother with it?

[SEOLocal92]

personally i will never delete and article even if there isn't any links pointing to it.

what i will do sometimes its built links to this articles to make the article page stronger and in overall your site stronger , just a suggestion...

it's good , it's content why delete it.,

hope that help you

Mike

[EGOL]

We put out at least a thousand very short news blurbs per year.  These are mostly for events that have almost no value to visitors a few months later. (Visitors bounce off hard)

About once a year we run analytics on these pages to find out which ones are pulling traffic.  This traffic is usually related to the topic but not to the out-of-date event.  Where we have nice traffic coming in we look for a similar current topic, write a short story and redirect the old URL to the new one.

Any pages that do not have nice  traffic are deleted and redirected to the blog homepage.  Some of these deleted pages have links so that value is passed to the homepage - which faces competition.

In my opinion, having lots of pages on your site that are not pulling in traffic and have no value to visitors is like dead weight.  You will ride higher in the water and sail faster if you toss them overboard.

[NicheGuy21]

Amongst all my commercial sites I have a site related to politics. In this instance I receive traffic to links that may date back to 2001 because the "long tail" of the post title relates to what a visitor searched for.

If your sites has content that may have historical value to someone it then continues to add value as content IMHO.

I'm amazed when I see traffic to a very old post or related comments.

[DougRoberts]

EGOL, how do you manage the redirects when you've got so many?

[EGOL]

Great question, Doug. 

We file the news blurbs into folders by date (year or month).  When we abandon a folder we place an .htaccess file in that folder with specific redirects as the first few lines and then a wildcard redirect as last line.

Looks like this....

Redirect 301 /blog/2010/story-1.shtml  http://mysite.com/blog/2012/replacement-for-story-1.html
Redirect 301 /blog/2010/story-2.shtml  http://mysite.com/blog/2012/replacement-for-story-2.html
redirectMatch 301 ^/blog/2010/ http://mysite.com/blog/

[EGOL]

If you have thousands of articles that are not pulling search traffic, dropping them from your site allows the PR that's trapped in those pages to flow into the rest of the site.