The New Year is the perfect time for businesses to go through their entire website and conduct a content audit, or look through each piece of content and determine which content is still relevant, earning traffic and engagement, and which content just isn’t cutting it.
It’s a long and tedious process, but with all of the Google changes we saw this year (hint: many of them centered around content), a content audit is going to be necessary going forward. Have a plan—spreadsheets, extra workers, etc.—to help keep the annoyance and frustration down, and things should run smoothly.
Unfortunately, what many businesses find when completing a content audit is a lot of outdated content, which can mean several different things:
- Listings. Job listings often expire when a position has been filled, and real estate listings expire once a property has been sold.
- Products. Products can become outdated if they are no longer sold at a specific location, they are seasonal, or they are out-of-stock.
- Information. This is the type of outdated content SEO that most small business websites deal with. You might create a great post about how to use Facebook that is completely outdated now or have a “How To” post about something that can now be done on a computer or in an easier way.
Whatever the reason you’re finding that a webpage is outdated, you’re going to have to do something about it. Should you paste it right over it? Create an Error message? Once you know your options it’s easier to make your next move.
Different Options You Have for Outdated Content
Fortunately for Webmasters, there are really only three major ways to deal with expired or outdated content. Some of these options also work when you move your site to a new domain.
These options include:
1. 301 Redirects. These should be used if the page isn’t getting much traffic. Listings and expired product pages typically fall into this category.
A 301 redirect simply sends users from one page to another, and it’s quite easy to do for Webmasters). This will make sure that your SEO stays intact so you don’t lose all of the link juice you once earned while still making sure that readers are being taken to a related, yet relevant, new page.
The term “relevant” here is key. You don’t want to redirect them to any old page, but you want it to be related. Find a category page that is similar but isn’t going to become outdated in the future.
2. Re-work the content on the page. If the page is still getting a good amount of traffic and could easily be made relevant, simply paste over some of the content.
This option works best with the “information” third point discussed above. You can create a message that has an “update” if the majority of the content on the page is still relevant. If it’s all irrelevant but the topic is still something that interests readers (which you should know by looking at the traffic of the page), just re-write that content to make it relevant.
You don’t want to continually be re-working content, however, so use your best judgment. Is that topic likely to change again soon? If not, pasting a new article over some of that content might be a good idea, just keep the title and tags similar.
3. Delete the page altogether. If you have a page that is getting no traffic and has absolutely no links, you can just delete the page.
I recommend deleting a page only once in a while. In fact, it’s going to be pretty rare that you find a page that has to be deleted, but nonetheless it is an option.
One thing I also like to point out is 404 Errors. These errors are not ideal for SEO because search engine bots still crawl these pages. Visitors to your site are also very likely to bounce off of your site if they see that there is an error on your page. You can visit Google Search Console to learn more about 404 errors and when to use them correctly.
Tip: Stay on Top of Outdated Content Throughout the Year
Of course, it’s best to always keep on top of your outdated content so that you don’t have to deal with everything at once at the end of the year. Every time you create a listing, make a note somewhere of the date when that listing may expire or change the status to expired right away so you know something needs to happen to that webpage.
As for outdated information, keep an eye out in your industry to see if anything changed that might have affected some of your content. Other than that, you may just want to consider doing a content audit every few months instead of every year.