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I was trying to find some helpful resources online on this topic and haven't really found anything substantial.

What do people recommend to do with old, outdated videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo. They show up in search, but some mention outdated products. However, is it best practice to remove everything older and outdated from Youtube, etc. or is it better to have these in your library (quantity over quality). If you add new ones and they get more views, in the long run people will focus on the newer content and probably not watch something 6 years old, but should we be removing them, too? I''m under pressure to remove them and I wanted to do some research before committing.

We also started Google Plus after Youtube, so we now have two YouTubes (one empty one attached to our new G+ and one that's been established with a lot of videos - new and old). Would this be a good time to consolidate to one Youtube, migrating only the new stuff to the new YouTube and then slowly start removing the old YouTube channel?

Thanks!

Thanks Keri, I received your note!

In my duplicate content report, there are URLs showing as duplicate content.

All of the pages work, they do not redirect, and they are used for either IT debugging or as part of a legacy system using a split DNS, QAing the site, etc...

They aren't linked (or at least, shouldn't be) on any pages, and I am not seeing them in Search Results, but Moz is picking them up. Should I be worried about duplicate content here and how should I handle them? They are replicates of the current live site, but have different subdomains.

We are doing clean up before migrating to a new CMS, so I'm not sure it's worth fixing at this point, or if it is even an issue at all. But should I make sure they are in robots or take any action to address these?

Thanks!

I noticed you have:

For example on http://www.client.com/examplex

they had code:

The URL in the canonical code has a trailing slash at the end. Is that a mistype, or Is the site using canonicals as a way of addressing duplicate content by pointing the trailing slash version to the non trailing slash version?

If the CMS automatically creates two versions of each page with and without the slash, that might be one reason to have canonicals on every page.

Hi Caitlin,

Unfortunately, the site is structured in a way that anytime there is a change to a product version or name, a new path is created in our CMS (which is an old system called Vignette) and a new URL is created and the other is broken. Because there are 100s of these happening with each new product release, I get resistance from the web developers on my redirect requests. One reason being they'd have to do this manually each time, the other being site performance concerns. I had to really push to get the / vs non-trailing slash versions of the higher ranking pages on our site redirected and that wasn't nearly as many pages as this library.

I know my question is pretty broad. I'm just curious if someone out there has experienced similar issues and how they made the case that it needs to be fixed? Or if redirects is the only answer, will that many redirects negatively affect performance? Because we are moving to a new CMS where hopefully this won't be as big of an issue, is it best to take the hit now? As we migrate, all those links will eventually be broken. And trying to make the case to redirect 40,000 URLs might be even harder.

Because these are low-ranking pages, should I suggest removing this library from the website's root domain?

One of my biggest hurdles at my company is our Product Documentation library, which houses thousands of pages of publicly accessible and indexed content on old and new versions of our product. Every time a product name changes the URL changes, causing a 404, so I typically have 100s of 404s every few months from this site. It's housed off our main domain. We have 23,000+ Duplicate Pages, 40,000 missing meta descriptions, and 38,000 due to this library. It is not built the same as our main content, with page titles and meta descriptions, so everything is defaulted and duplicate. I'm trying to make a case that this is an issue, especially as we migrate our site next year to a new CMS.

Does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with this issue in the short term and long term? Is it worth asking the owners of the section of content to develop page titles and meta descriptions on 40,000 pieces of content? They do not see the value of SEO and the issues this can cause.

It needs to be publicly accessible, but it's not highly ranked content. It's really for customers who want to know more about the product. But I worry it is hurting other parts of our site, with the absurd amount of duplicate content, meta, and page title issues.

I noticed you have:

For example on http://www.client.com/examplex

they had code:

The URL in the canonical code has a trailing slash at the end. Is that a mistype, or Is the site using canonicals as a way of addressing duplicate content by pointing the trailing slash version to the non trailing slash version?

If the CMS automatically creates two versions of each page with and without the slash, that might be one reason to have canonicals on every page.