How to best handle expired content?

[JDatSB]

Similar to the eBay situation with "expired" content, what is the best way to approach this?

Here are a few examples.

With an e-commerce site, for a seasonal category of "Christmas" .. what's the best way to handle this category page after it's no longer valid?  404?  301?  leave it as-is and date it by year?

Another example.  If I have an RSS feed of videos from a big provider, say Vevo, what happens when Vevo tells me to "expire" a video that it's no longer available?

Thank you!

[GeoffKenyon]

As Jeff pointed out, with something like a Christmas category page, you'll want to leave it up so that you can use it easily next year (and maintain any links associated with the page). You can easily remove navigation links to the page during the off season and add them in in the months leading up to the season so that you're again passing internal link equity to the pages.

Regarding the RSS feed content, I'd probably 301 it to a related video or to a relevant category page, though you could make a case for leaving it up, saying that the content is no longer available and providing related videos for the user to navigate to.

[customerparadigm.com]

Jonathan -

Great question… There's a great Moz article from April 2012 about how to handle expired content.
http://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content

In a nutshell, the author says that there isn't one solution for all situations.  But the lens that they give is to figure out what is going to create the best user experience.

The author's advice:
For the vast majority of scenarios, I'd suggest 301 redirecting your expired content to another page. This is usually the best option for SEO and can also be customized to enhance the user experience via dynamically-generated messages. For instance, if a product page had garnered external links, you're able to retain most of the link equity from those links via a 301 redirect (whereas with a 404, that link equity is lost). Why would you want to lose the link equity that you had worked so hard to obtain? Furthermore, it demonstrates to search engines that your site is well-maintained and up-to-date or "fresh".

However, for seasonal items, it's recommended that you leave the pages on the site year-round:

If a product is seasonal, such as the case for fashion products (example: swimsuits), you might want to leave the page on the site permanently… And if you don't want the page to be indexed in the off-season, add a meta tag to noindex/follow the page.

Hope this helps!

• Jeff