A client of mine is runs a news website and produces several stories per day. Is there an SEO benefit of archiving old stories and is there any guidelines for doing so?
deadsea
5:47 pm on Jul 5, 2011 (gmt 0)
If it is anything like the forums that I have worked with, some articles will get hits month after month, and most will never rank for any worthwhile search term. My strategy has been to archive as much as possible, but only link to the ones with potential. These are the ones that are "most viewed", "most commented", "most searched for". You can feature such lists on your site to drive users and pagerank to the high potential stories. You might be able to have some sort of "evergreen" score associated with articles as well. My experience is that some topics only have interest when they are fresh and some have interest long after. Being able to sort those two types out should help as well.
dataguy
9:07 pm on Jul 5, 2011 (gmt 0)
Ditto what deadsea says. I've been archiving for years, using a pretty complicated formula which takes into account search referrals, crawl frequency, author trust, on-site demand, and evergreen-ness. The first time I did this, it released the site from a penalty (back in 2007).
Of course now the site has been Pandalized, so maybe I don't know nothing. I still think it's a good thing to practice.
cloud36
9:13 pm on Jul 5, 2011 (gmt 0)
What is the best way to go about it, they don't use a CMS so I would have to give tech details...I'm not sure what the difference between an archived story is and a normal one..other than the url
dataguy
9:28 pm on Jul 5, 2011 (gmt 0)
Some sites simply add a noindex meta tag to archive an article. This allows the article to continue to be accessed if needed, but supposedly removes the page from the search engines.
I return a 404 for these articles and block the search engine bots from viewing them. Once an article is gone, I want to make sure it's gone.
