Best practices for temporary articles

[Alexandre_]

Hello,

I would like to have expert inputs about the best way to manage temporary content?

In my case, I've a page (ex : mydomain.com/agenda) where I have listing of temporary article, with a lifetime of 1 month to 6 months for some of them.

My articles also have a specific url like for ex : mydomain.com/agenda/12-02-2011/thenameofmyarticle/

As you can guess, I got hundreds of 404

I'm already using canonical tag, should I use a  in the listing page? I'm a bit lost here..

[Entrusteddev]

Would it be possible to 'Archive' articles after the 1-6month period ?

Archive could just be a database flag that keeps the articles from appearing in Article index thus keeping the same url, but not clogging up main site with hundreds of links to expired articles?

[1128]

If you are using canonical tag, what is the context for that tag? do you already have a destination URL for these temporary articles?

[Alexandre_]

Hello Aran,

Thanks for your answers!

Unfortunately no, since the content is very "dated" (ex : 3 days music festival, etc.), we don't keep archive of this kind of content.

[Alexandre_]

Hello Arcanis,

Yes we have a destination URL for these contents, I just don't know how I can manage it when it disappears...

[MarkLoud]

I agree with Aran, setup an archive system that keeps the articles under the same URL but does not show them live on the website.

Alternatively you could setup a dumping "archive" folder where you drop all old articles in and use this link as your rel canonical link

[Entrusteddev]

You can use the meta robots tags as you mentioned in your question, this will prevent search engines indexing the pages, unfortunately we need to tackle the human side of the issue,if anyone links to the article, then eventually the link will result in a 404 page.

There is nothing wrong with a 404 page, they serve an imporant purpose. Since your articles are not around very long and not being indexed by search engines I see no reason to simply leave the 404 in place.

Ensure you have a custom 404 which is an imformative and helpful resource rather than a simple 404 Page not found message. use the 404 to direct the visitor to a category level page which is related to the topic of the article. Offer a simple list of links to various parts of the site that may be of interest.

Check out the SEOmoz articles

www.seomoz.org/blog/personalizing-your-404-error-pages

www.seomoz.org/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo

Hope this helps.

[Entrusteddev]

It seems so unnatural to want to actually remove content when we spend so long striving to create awesome content!

[EGOL]

We have temporary content and evergreen content.

When a page of temporary content is created it is filed in a folder according to its "expiration date".  On that date the folder is 301 redirected to an appropriate destination.  However, before the redirect is done we run analytics on the folder to see if any files are pulling traffic from SERPs or links from other websites.  We then try to create evergreen content on the same topic that will capture that traffic and redirect the specific files to the new evergreen content.

[Getz.pro]

{script to test page URL}

$location = "http://www.YourSite.com/";

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");

header("Location: {$location}");

exit;

}

[Alexandre_]

Thanks Aran!

[Alexandre_]

thanks Richard.

I'm going to try this.

[Alexandre_]

Thanks you Egol