SEO for a News based site : Outdated content

[Wpfreesetup]

How do we maintain the SEO of a 5 year old News content based site? How should we deal with 3-4 year old content, which are outdated or not searched?  Some of them are still useful as archiving/history of a topic..but not searched.... ??

Should we no-index them? or should we keep it like that?

[LesleyPaone]

I would leave them be. Use accurate meta tags initially, then just let them stay. One thing I would add if it is possible, is to use authorship rich snippets. If the news articles are reviewed, add that one too. Another suggestion I might give is to internally link them to newer articles. Like say you have one from 2007 that talks about Googles stock price, I would link it to the most current one that talks about Googles stock price and put a little message in about an updated article. Other than that, I think you will be fine.

[jesse-landry]

Forget about the old content and build new content. That's the best advice I can give.

If the old content is good, keep it. If it sucks, get rid of it. If it's mediocre and timeless, re-vamp it.

Good luck!

[EGOL]

Don't ask us.

Look at your analytics.  Look at your income.  Look at your visitor counts. Look at your links, likes and social shares.

One problem with big news sites is that they have waaaayyyy too much content and that makes it hard to manage.  Many of them use category pages to keep the old content available.  They have category pages for just about every city and person and organization that has ever been mentioned on their site.  Then when that topic is mentioned in a story it gets a hyperlink to the proper category page.

The category pages can be enormously valuable and rank in the SERPs, pull in traffic, acquire links, likes tweets more.