Delete or not delete outdated content

[Enrico_Cassinelli]

Hi there!
We run a website about a region in Italy, the Langhe area, where we write about wine and food, local culture, and we give touristic informations.

The website also sports a nice events calendar: in 4 years we (and our users) loaded more than 5700 events. Now, we're starting to have some troubles managing this database.

The database related to events is huge both in file size and number of rows. There are a lot of images that eat up disk space, and also it's becoming difficult to manage all the data in our backend. Also, a lot of users are entering the website by landing on outdated events.

I was wondering if it could be a good idea to delete events older than 6 months: the idea was to keep only the most important and yearly recurring events (which we can update each year with fresh information), and trash everything else.

This of course means that 404 errors will increase, and also that our content will gettin thinner, but at the same time we'll have a more manageable database, and the content will be more relevant and "clean".

What do you think?

thank you

Best

[Ria_]

Especially with recurring events, duplicate content also might be causing you issues down the line. You could always delete the events which are older than 12 months, and 301 the old event URLs to the current or upcoming ones. This way, you won't have duplicate content issues with recurring events, and searchers won't be landing on outdated events.

[DirkC]

For old content which is expired - just let them 404 or redirect to a newer version of the page (if available).
For new content that is going to expire you could use the unavailable after tag - see also this advice from Matt Cutts on content that expires (it's more about products for e-commerce - but the general principle is the same).

Dirk

[DonnaDuncan]

I love this post by Everett Sizemore from last year and refer to it often. It's a step-by-step how-to for auditing content. Chapter 8 talks about considerations when deciding whether to rewrite / remove / redirect / consolidate content. Give it a read and see if it helps clarify matters for you.

[Everett]

Thank you Donna. We have seen a lot of success with the pruning method for outdated content. I'm glad the article has helped you.