Old Content Pages

[dueces]

Hello we run a large sports website. Since 2009 we have been doing game previews for most games every day for all the major sports..IE NFL, CFB, NBA, MLB etc.. Most of these previews generate traffic for 1-2 days leading up to or day of the event. After that there is minimal if any traffic and over the years almost nothing to the old previews. If you do a search for any of these each time the same matchup happens Google will update its rankings and filter out any old matchups/previews with new ones. So our question is what would you do with all this old content? Is it worth just keeping? Google Indexes a majority of it? Should we prune some of the old articles? The other option we thought of and its not really practical is to create event pages where we reuse a post each time the teams meet but if there was some sort of benefit we could do it.

[Chris_Hickman]

Hey Cole,

Good question. There are a couple of different routes you could take with the old or expired content. Leave as is, redirect to more relevant current content or remove it entirely from your site.

My recommendation would be to redirect these old pages to the most relevant updated content unless they are receiving any significant amount of traffic. If the traffic is at 0 and the page is indexed, you are probably better off increasing the page authority of a more recent article or page by using a 301 redirect. You'll also want to ask what is the best option for user experience, it may be beneficial to have these posts in a searchable archive for users.

There is a great article describing the options in a post on the Moz blog entitled "How Should You Handle Expired Content."

Hope my recommendation and the article help you make a decision. Best of luck with organizing your site.