Did it earn a lot of inbound links? Continues to drive traffic? Then it might be worth keeping. If it’s still accurate and necessary information, then you might find good reasons to leave it alone. What exactly should you do with this content? You have four options for fixing each piece: A well-groomed site enhances a user’s experience because he won’t stumble across inaccurate information or waste time reading two blog posts when one would suffice. Expired and old information communicates to search engines (and your audience) that your site is stale. As Stephanie Chang writes, “You don’t want to risk wasting your crawl allowance having bots crawl pages that are thin in unique content and value.” But search engine bots will also require more bandwidth to crawl your site. True, the more pages on your site, the wider your reach in search engine traffic. Here are three benefits of attending to expired content:
There are a number of good reasons why you shouldn’t ignore old, broken, and neglected sections of your website. Now, this might take an afternoon or longer, but as Sonia said in her article on content audits, there are a number of benefits to knowing what’s in your archives. To properly attend to other pages, you may just have to walk through your archives. You’ll know where some of this content is off the top of your head. The pages you’ve forgotten about in your archives that desperately need some attention. It’s those old sales pages, obsolete product pages, and other outdated content. This is why we encourage you to audit your site.īut before you dive into a full-blown comprehensive content audit, it might be possible to make your job a little easier by first dealing with all of the expired content. One of the first steps to creating adaptive content is becoming aware of the content you already have.