Best way to keep a news site indexed in google

[epmaniac]

hi, what is the best way to keep a news site (which has new pages coming in every day and hundreds of pages becoming obsolete (which will never be read again) )

what strategy is best to keep the PR juice flowing only to the latest pages?... should i delete the old pages and display 404 or should i keep all the old pages?.... dont u think keeping 5 year old news will dilute the overall PR juice flow of the site?

[epmaniac]

please dont ignore my post, help me and other people like me who may have this question in mind ;)

[danijelzi]

I had the same dilemma. I've 404-ed a number of old pages, but not all. I've kept pages which had good inbound links from around the web, and for newer posts I think you also shouldn't delete those with likes, tweets, +1s etc. Also, I would keep unique pages and delete those with thin and duplicate content.

However, I don't know if deleting will have any effect on rankings. I did that about month ago and now waiting for SERP updates to see if there was any effect.

[1script]

A someone who collects and actually reads 100+ years old newspapers and magazines for research I would not be so sure no one will read the old news again. They are often useful bits of information. I see no reason to delete them unless you're afraid you'll run out of space (and space is cheap these days).

[epmaniac]

can we have more input abt this?

[Harry]

Just keep them. Make sure you only serve unique contents.

[tedster]

I work with one magazine-style site. We move old articles into an "archives" area with just one link in from the home page. We don't change the actual URLs of the pages, just the way they're interlinked with the rest of the website - and it seems to work just fine. The archived pages are still getting some search traffic, in fact, and they are there for anyone who has interest.

[Zivush]

That is my dilemma too although I have an articles sites.
I'd never delete pages that receive organic traffic from any search engine but certainly think of moving to another domain or linking differently in the site itself - No good answer yet.

If there's any value to the content, you may also SEO some of the pages by changing their titles and subtitles.

[Harry]

I view older articles not from a SEO perspective but from a user-focus one. You never know what article might be linked to or needed by a user, like a researcher. I'm always amazed at how some articles have a second lease on life years after they were published. Sometimes, it just happens. Older articles are also useful to provide context for newer related ones. You could link to them as a related article feature which will reinforce the newer article and provide more context to your visitors.

Of course, this is not exactly good SEO. Panda may not be friendly to that.