Sites with dynamic content - GWT redirects and deletions

[ozgeekmum]

We have a site that has extremely dynamic content.

Every day they publish around 15 news flashes, each of which is setup as a distinct page with around 500 words.    File structure is  bluewidget.com/news/long-news-article-name.  No timestamp in URL.

After a year, that's a lot of news flashes. The database was getting inefficient (it's managed by a ColdFusion CMS) so we started automatically physically deleting news flashes from the database, which sped things up.

The problem is that Google Webmaster Tools is detecting the freshly deleted pages and reporting large numbers of 404 pages.  There are so many 404s that it's hard to see the non-news 404s, and I understand it would be a negative quality indicator to Google having that many missing pages.

We were toying with setting up redirects, but the volume of redirects would be so large that it would slow the site down again to load a large htaccess file for each page.

Because there isn't a datestamp in the URL we couldn't create a mask in the htaccess file automatically redirecting all bluewidget.com/news/yymm* to bluewidget.com/news

These long tail pages do send traffic, but for speed we only want to keep the last month of news flashes at the most.

What would you do to avoid Google thinking its a poorly maintained site?

[MoosaHemani]

Well, to be honest Chris, It is a poorly maintained site. I mean deleting the past news is not at all the solution... I guess the right solution is to work on hosting side and enhance the data base or else the problem will be continuous.

If you are going to use too many redirections this will cause another problem and at the same time will slow down your website speed.

Actually 404s are generating because the URL is available in Google index but there is no page on your website available against it and this causes a 404... The easy way is to reduce 404 is to send a removal request to Google from Google webmaster tool.

And for future... instead of removing pages you should try investing on database and better hosting.

[matbennett]

Get someone to look at the database queries in coldfusion. Unless you have tens of millions of flashes it should be able to handle it on even a reasonably modest server for your traffic levels.  It doesn't sound like it should be taxing.

However it sounds like your problem is some badly structured queries. The good news though is that this is probably quicker and easier too fix than upgrading hosting, coding new removal behaviour or any other "work-around"

What would you do to avoid Google thinking its a poorly maintained site?

Sorry to sound glib, but the answer is "maintain it better".