SEO for expiring pages

2 pointsbee14y ago3 comments

Hello, I have a q regarding SEO

I have a free classifieds websites, with categories/ads. Each ad is active for 30 days and then is marked as expired. How should I handle this better from SEO point of view?

1. Display the ad and put a message that this ad is expired? 2. Make a 301 redirect to category the ad belongs to 3. Make a 301 redirect to index page? 4. Other ideas?

3 comments

3 comments · 2 top-level

patio1114y ago· 1 in thread

What volume of pages are we talking about?

At below-mass-scales, I would encourage you to keep the page content roughly similar to what it is, mark expired pages as expired, and maybe put a modal window with "This ad is expired. See related ads or post your own ad." or something on top of the old content, with an option for people to close that and see the archived content.

At mass scales (more than "thousands" of pages), I'd suggest either a) doing the above but also no-indexing those pages or b) 301 them to the category page. The rationale for this is that you don't want to get hit by Panda for having lots and lots of not-so-much-value pages.

beeOP14y ago

Yeah I have thousands of pages. And I would want to remove them permanently as I don't want to give users non-value pages.

beeOP14y ago

And any idea how to handle best duplicate content (since is a free classifieds website, these ads are across all internet)?

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