Best Way To Handle Expired Content
-
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 -
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!
-
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!
-
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() BETWEENdate_from
ANDdate_to
,
0,
1
) ASexpired
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.
-
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
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What's the best way to handle product filter URLs?
I've been researching and can't find a clear cut answer. Imagine you have a product category page e.g. domain/jeans You've a lot of options as to how to filter the results domain/jeans?=ladies,skinny,pink,10 or domain/jeans/ladies-skinny-pink-10 or domain/jeans/ladies/skinny?=pink,10 And in this how do you handle titles, breadcrumbs etc. Is the a way you prefer to handle filters and why do you do it that way? I'm trying to make my mind up as some very big names handle this differently e.g. http://www.next.co.uk/shop/gender-women-category-jeans/colour-pink-fit-skinny-size-10r VS https://www.matalan.co.uk/womens/shop-by-category/jeans?utf8=✓&[facet_filter][meta.tertiary_category][Skinny]=on&[facet_filter][variants.meta.size][Size+10]=on&[facet_filter][meta.master_colour][Midwash]=on&[facet_filter][min_current_price][gte]=6.0&[facet_filter][min_current_price][lte]=18.0&per=36&sort=
Technical SEO | | RodneyRiley0 -
404 Best Practices
Hello All, So about 2 months ago, there was a massive spike in the number of crawl errors on my site according to Google Webmaster tools. I handled this by sending my webmaster a list of the broken pages with working pages that they should 301 redirect to. Admittedly, when I looked back a couple weeks later, the number had gone down only slightly, so I sent another list to him (I didn't realize that you could 'Mark as fixed' in webmaster tools) So when I sent him more, he 301 redirected them again (with many duplicates) as he was told without really digging any deeper. Today, when I talked about more re-directs, he suggested that 404's do have a place, that if they are actually pages that don't exist anymore, then a ton of 301 re-directs may not be the answer. So my two questions are: 1. Should I continue to relentlessly try to get rid of all 404's on my site, and if so, do I have to be careful not to be lazy and just send most of them to the homepage. 2. Are there any tools or really effective ways to remove duplicate 301 redirect records on my .htaccess (because the size of it at this point could very well be slowing down my site). Any help would be appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Duplicate Content Issues
We have some "?src=" tag in some URL's which are treated as duplicate content in the crawl diagnostics errors? For example, xyz.com?src=abc and xyz.com?src=def are considered to be duplicate content url's. My objective is to make my campaign free of these crawl errors. First of all i would like to know why these url's are considered to have duplicate content. And what's the best solution to get rid of this?
Technical SEO | | RodrigoVaca0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, I'm working on a site and I'm having some issues with its structure causing duplicate content. The first issue is that the search pages will show up as duplicates.
Technical SEO | | OOMDODigital
A search for new inventory may be new.aspx
The duplicate may be something like new.aspx=page1, or something like that and so on. The second issue is with inventory. When new inventory gets put into the stock of the store, a new page for that item will be populated with duplicate content. There appears to be no canonical source for that page. How can I fix both of these? Thanks!0 -
Can Page Content & Description Have Same Content?
I'm studying my crawl report and there are several warnings regarding missing meta descriptions. My website is built in WordPress and part of the site is a blog. Several of these missing description warnings are regarding blog posts and I was wondering if I am able to copy the first few lines of content of each of the posts to put in the meta description, or would that be considered duplicate content? Also, there are a few warnings that relate to blog index pages, e.g. http://www.iainmoran.com/2013/02/ - I don't know if I can even add a description of these as I think they are dynamically created? While on the subject of duplicate content, if I had a sidebar with information on several of the pages (same info) while the content would be coming from a WP Widget, would this still be considered duplicate content and would Google penalise me for it? Would really appreciate some thoughts on this,please. Thanks, Iain.
Technical SEO | | iainmoran0 -
Content on top-level-domain vs. content on subpage
Hello Seomoz community, I just built a new website, mainly for a single affiliate programm and it ranks really well at google. Unfortunately the merchant doesn’t like the name of my domain, that’s why I was thrown out of the affiliate program. So suppose the merchant is a computer monitor manufacturer and his name is “Digit”. The name of my domain is something like monitorsdigital.com at the moment. (It’s just an example, I don’t own this URL). The structure of my website is: 1 homepage with much content on it + a blog. The last 5 blog entries are displayed on the homepage. Because I got kicked out of the affiliate program I want to permanent redirect monitorsdigital.com to another domain. But what should the new website look like? I have two possibilities: Copy the whole monitorsdigital website to a new domain, called something like supermonitors.com. Integrate the monitorsdigital website into my existing website about different monitor manufacturers. E.g.: allmonitors.com/digit-monitors.html (that url is permitted by the merchant) What do you think is the better way? I just got the impression, that it seems to be a little easier to rank high with a top-level-domain (www.supermonitors.com) than with a subpage (www.allmonitors.com/digit-monitors.html). However the subpage can benefit from the domain authority, that was generated by other subpages. Thanks for your help and best regards MGMT
Technical SEO | | MGMT0 -
Correct Way to Write Meta
OK so this is a really, really basic question. However, I'm seeing some meta written differently to normal and I'm wondering if a) this is correct and b) whether there is any benefit. Normally it's like this: However, I am seeing it written like this is some places: So, the content= and name= are swapped around. I assume the people that did this were thinking that bringing the content forward would mean that Google reads keywords first. Just wondering if anybody knows whether this is good practice or not? Just spiked my interest so apologies for the basic nature of the question!
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0 -
Best Way to Handle - International Content - Different Language
Our site currently is focused in the USA and the entire site is in the English language. We have considered broadening our scope to include content from foreign countries - i.e. Brazil. What is the best way to approach this -- can we use our existing domain and just have a specific section of the site that is dedicated to a particular Country with content translated into that Country's predominant language? OR could this create SEO issues -- having a domain with both English and some other language? Would it be better to have this on a totally different domain with Country extension? This is totally foreign territory for me - bad pun intended. Any advice, help would be appreciated. Thanks. Matt
Technical SEO | | MWM37720