Comments on: SEO Dilemma: How to Get Rid of Hundreds of Short-Term Pages

By: Andrea Moro

Andrea Moro — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:56:25 +0000

@Geo it mostly depends on what the UGC talk about. If they are pure personal experience probably it will be.

By: Rohit

Rohit — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:46:28 +0000

hmm that is such a inforamtive post Ann, and thanks deepali for the code “Putting unavailable_after meta tags.. like META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”unavailable_after: “25-Aug-2007 15:00:00 EST”

By: Alan Bleiweiss

Alan Bleiweiss — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:30:24 +0000

Why would you want to have pages that exist for just one day to ever get into the search engines? That’s where I’m lost. And in that scenario, I agree with the noindex,nofollow / robots.txt disallow method.

By: dhiraj

dhiraj — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 06:15:38 +0000

I agree with Dipali…

By: Dipali

Dipali — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 04:58:43 +0000

Putting unavailable_after meta tags.. like META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”unavailable_after: “25-Aug-2007 15:00:00 EST”

By: Dipali

Dipali — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 04:57:03 +0000

as far as short pages concerned, i like to put more relevant content on that short term pages. if your website has some page is talking about 2008, in that page you can put more for 2009 and other offers.this idea will click as older page has more visits than newer page.

Another idea is to put this meta tags on short term pages..

By: Geo

Geo — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:16:41 +0000

The tourism example is quite different from what is at hand – user generated content that once expired has nothing to replace it…

By: Andrea Moro

Andrea Moro — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:43:45 +0000

That’s a big deal Anna. If think that whenever possible the old web page should be keep fresh with new data.
I give you an example that looks working pretty fine on the tourism field. I setup specific time-frame related web page that periodically expire because the event is gone.
What I do is leave the web page on the server, simply saying that offer is gone, but the next valid period, I edit again the web page, change the offer and the validity and push the new content in.

The results is that those web page are very well indexed for the keywords I need.

Note that I don’t use the meta tag expires, otherwise I will probably get the web page “penalized” at the end of the offer.

By: Someguy

Someguy — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:29:04 +0000

I would probably go for 301 than custom 404. I don’t know that sites architecture so I can not judge what would really make sense, but the target page of your 301 could be provided with noindex,follow for example…

By: Geo

Geo — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:07:10 +0000

That’s a straightforward situation, I really don’t see anything special in it. First, stop the new pages from ever making it into the google index (robots.txt anyone?). Second – 404 the old pages with a friendly custom 404 page to minimize user frustration and to let Google drop the pages as quick as possible. Problem solved.