Strategies to deal with a lot of expiring pages?

[oodlum]

I have a site with user-created content that disappears regularly as users delete or pause their accounts. This leads to a lot of duplicate content; we show the user a list of alternatives, similar to a custom 404.

What's the best way to handle this? I think a custom 410 (Gone) is probably the correct approach for deleted profiles, and a 404 for paused profiles (so they can be re-indexed later if the user returns) but I find this solution very messy. I can't believe all of this expiring content is a signal of quality.

I'd rather simply 301 their content to the relevant main index page eg

/profiles/town/username/

301 to /profiles/town/

which is an index page of all profiles for that town.

Another example

/blogs/username/
/blogs/username/post.shtml

301 to /blogs/

I think this is the best approach for users, and a good way to get defunct content and duplicate templates out of the google index, but I'm worried that the destination page content will be confused with the referring page. After all, the pages have not literally been relocated.

I'm very interested to hear your thoughts.

[tedster]

This question is very similar to another current thread: How to best handle requests for removed documents [webmasterworld.com]. That discussion has been going for a few days, now, and may give you some useful input.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:46 pm (utc) on Mar. 26, 2009]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]

[oodlum]

Thanks Ted - I missed that one