Handling Temporary Content

How do I deal with content that I'll only have for a limited time?

[ccDan]

Let's say my web site is widgets.dom.

I have a number of articles on the site, all original and unique to the site.

John, Joe and Tom are all willing to write additional articles for my site, which I get to publish first before anyone else. After, say six months, John wants them removed and he'll use them exclusively on his own site; Joe will allow others to begin using his; and Tom will want them removed, and he won't use them online anymore.

It would be a benefit to use all three writers for my site, because it gives me fresh content on a recurring basis, and allows me to have more current information than what I would otherwise have.

The question is, how do I put these articles online, knowing that they will be removed at a later point? I don't want to have to change them all to 404s, as some of them may not have a place to point to, aside from the home page. Should I use a no-index or no-cache meta tag on each of these pages?

[jonrichd]

If you use the NOINDEX directive, you won't have a problem if you later remove the files, on the other hand, they won't be in the SEs either, which may not be what you want to do.

The NOCACHE directive will prevent the SEs from showing a cache of the content, but will still have them index the pages, so you will still end up with 404s.

Here are some ideas for dealing with the issue:

1: Assuming you are going to have some sort of "table of contents" for all your articles, when an article is removed, redirect it back to the table of contents. If the theme of the articles stays the same, this will at least give your visitor the option of viewing other related articles, although s/he may not know how they got there. I would recommend this solution if you think there will be external linking to these articles, so you can keep the benefit of the links.

2: Put all the content that you know will be around on a temporary basis into a specific directory on the server. Within that directory, set up a custom 404 page that explains that you are only allowed to use content for a certain time, and the article is no longer available. Then suggest some locations (like your table of contents page) where the visitor could go to find similar information. That way, when you have to pull a page, the user gets helpful information that tells them where to go, and might keep them on the site.

HTH

[rogerd]

Another idea would be to replace the content with similar content written by you or others. If the original content develops some good SE traffic or perhaps even some deep links, your new content on the same pages will continue to benefit from this visibility.