Best practices for temporary articles
-
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..
-
Thanks you Egol
-
thanks Richard.
I'm going to try this.
-
Thanks Aran!
-
{script to test page URL}
$location = "http://www.YourSite.com/";
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: {$location}");
exit;
}
-
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.
-
It seems so unnatural to want to actually remove content when we spend so long striving to create awesome content!
-
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.
-
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
-
Hello Arcanis,
Yes we have a destination URL for these contents, I just don't know how I can manage it when it disappears...
-
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.
-
If you are using canonical tag, what is the context for that tag? do you already have a destination URL for these temporary articles?
-
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?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What IS SEO FRIENDLY BEST PRACTICE FOR URLS FILTERED 'TAGGED'
EX: https://www.STORENAME.com/collections/all-deals/alcatel– Tagged "Alcatel", when I run audits, I come across these URLS that give me duplicate content and missing H1. This is Canonical: https://www.STORENAMEcom/collections/all-deals/alcatel Any advice on how to tackle these I have about4k in my store! Thank you
Technical SEO | | Sscha0030 -
Unpublish and republish old articles
This might be a dumb question but we had an incident where a new SEO guy thought it would be a good idea to un-publish and republish all of your 200+ blog posts which we carefully scheduled over the last 6 months. He did not update the content and did not change anything. His intention was to send out google a sign to recheck the sites or something. Now, the entire blog looks like it wen't live in one day, which I don't think is good? Should we load a backup and get our old publishing dates back, should we keep it with the new publishing dates? What are the consequences? Will it effect our SEO?
Technical SEO | | Funlocity1 -
Best Practice Out-of-Date Sales and Events
Hi Everyone, http://www.palaceresorts.com/cozumelpalace/en/cozumel-ironman-triathlon I found an out-of-date event in the clients' crawl report that returns a 404 not found Status Code. I remember to have read an article advising webmasters to don't ever remove a single landing page, but instead to advise that the sale/event it's expired and some information about the upcoming event. Does anyone have had this experience before ? Could you provide me with a real case scenario. Thank You
Technical SEO | | Ariadna-US0 -
What's the best way to integrate off site inventory?
I can't seem to make any progress with my car dealership client in rankings or traffic. I feel like I've narrowed out most of the common problems, the only other thing I can see is that all their inventory is on a subdomain using a dedicated auto dealership software. Any suggestion of a better way to handle this situation? Am I missing something obvious? The url is rcautomotive.com Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | GravitateOnline0 -
Creating a help hub, not sure the best name to use, " keyword help " or " help hub "?
I've been creating new content for our site, lots of help related content, so I created a help hub section. Now the more I go through it, and look at url structure and breadcrumbs, I can't help but think I should be using a keyword in there, but also don't want to over do it, since the keyword we are shooting for is also a subsection of our site, complete with url keyword and breadcrumb. So I just don't want to have too many over redundant titles like keyword this and keyword that, so I came here to get some advice from the awesome community of folks. Keep help hub so it's: Url: site.com/help-hub/helppage1 Breadcrumb: Home > Help-Hub > Help Page 1 or Url: site.com/keyword/help/helppage1 Breadcrumb: Home > Keyword > Help > Help Page 1
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
My Article Post Title in both the h1 and the h2 are the same. Is this good seo?
I'm seeing a common practice in wordpress themes where the h1 tag for a page has the logo in it, then the h2 would be the title to the article. I've decided to place the title in the h1 dynamically, like this: - Joe's Auto Store where '' is the actual title to the post - the logo is still being used as a background image in the h1... So for example, the page would show this: How install a car battery - Joe's Auto Store I think this is good seo still, but the other issue is that the first, subsequent also has the exact same title because this is the actual post title, which uses the first h2 on the page to display the title. So the code would look like this: - My Company paragraph content text stuff an example would be How install a car battery - Joe's Auto Store How install a car battery At Joe's we teach how to install batteries on site. There are mor...(etc.) Is this an issue since the post title in both the h1 and h2 are nearly the same (except for the company name)? Is this good seo still?
Technical SEO | | johnnydigital0 -
I'm redesigning a website which will have a new URL format. What's the best way to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones? Is there an automated, fast way to do this?
For example, the new URL will be: https://oregonoptimalhealth.com/about_us.html while the old one's were like this: http://www.oregonoptimalhealth.com/home/ooh/smartlist_1/services.html I have redirect almost 100 old pages to the correct new page. What's the best and easiest way to do this?
Technical SEO | | PolarisMarketing0 -
Best free tool to check internal broken links
Question says it all I guess. What would your recommend as the best free tool to check internal broken links?
Technical SEO | | RikkiD225