Best Way To Handle Expired Content

[Matthew_Edgar]

Hi,

I have a client's site that posts job openings. There is a main list of available jobs and each job has an individual page linked to from that main list. However, at some point the job is no longer available. Currently, the job page goes away and returns a status 404 after the job is no longer available.

The good thing is that the job pages get links coming into the site. The bad thing is that as soon as the job is no longer available, those links point to a 404 page. Ouch. Currently Google Webmaster Tools shows 100+ 404 job URLs that have links (maybe 1-3 external links per).

The question is what to do with the job page instead of returning a 404. For business purposes, the client cannot display the content after the job is no longer available. To avoid duplicate content issues, the old job page should have some kind of unique content saying the job is longer available.

Any thoughts on what to do with those old job pages? Or would you argue that it is appropriate to return 404 header plus error page since this job is truly no longer a valid page on the site?

Thanks for any insights you can offer.
Matthew

[Matthew_Edgar]

Hey Sebastian -

We already do something similar to know if it is expired (instead of the if condition in MySQL, we query for records where job_closing_date >= CURDATE()). Thankfully they programmed that in to pull the old job off the list and out of the job search results. (Though up until yesterday the old jobs were on the XML sitemap...woops. Guess what I fixed yesterday!)

I like your idea though of keeping the content active and keeping the page alive, but with some kind of message above there. That would definitely keep the page unique. I'm not positive that will fly on the business side but I'll definitely propose that.

Thanks for the reply!

[Matthew_Edgar]

I like that idea of 301 redirecting the page back to the job search page. The search page would certainly be a good introduction and probably satisfy looking for the job. These pages aren't high ranking pages in the SERPs, the traffic is referral traffic from other websites. Give that, so Utah Tiger's question about keywords and search engine wouldn't apply in this website's case. Thanks for the idea!

[coremediadesign]

Hi Matthew,

What I would do is to still have it accessible through a direct link, but not through a list of jobs displayed on the main site. I would also include the note at the top of the page saying something like 'This job offer has already expired'.

This way you still have a page, which is unique, does not show on the main jobs list and indicates that it is expired.

I'm not sure how much of the programming knowledge you have and what technology is the site built in, but a simple IF condition in your SQL statement to add specific flag to each record indicating whether it is expired or not would be something like this (this specific one is based on the MySQL syntax):

IF (
    CURDATE() BETWEEN date_from AND date_to,
    0,
    1
) AS expired

Then, when you call specific job you simply check whether the 'expired' field is equal 1 - and if so - display the message above the job.

I hope this helps.

[Boodreaux]

EGOL..Your technical response is way above me....could you restate in tyro terms.

Is the expired data hidden? Does the 301 redirect go to homepage or job search page or either? What value does it add?  Keywords? I guess the pages would still be indexed in order for value to be created or does a 301 redirect just add all the value on the page it is redirected too?  I will also go look up 301 redirects right now.

Utah Tiger

[EGOL]

I have expiring content on one of my sites.

I place all of the postings into folders according to date such as...

mysite.com/postings/2012/02/job-at-mcds/

Then on certain dates I add an htaccess file to the /2012/02/ folder that will 301 redirect all items in that folder to the homepage.

You could 301 the old posts to a job search page or some other type of page that will introduce the visitor to your site.