Working With Outdated Pages And Tags In Wordpress

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Working With Outdated Pages And Tags In Wordpress

vandread

8:55 am on Jan 21, 2010 (gmt 0)

I have a question that I would like to put up for discussion here. Lets say you have got a big Wordpress site with thousands of articles and maybe 10k tags. Naturally some of the articles and tags will become outdated, say you wrote about widget 2.0 a while ago and the developers have released widget 3.0 now with no one using or searching for widget 2.0 anymore.

Parameters:

Search engine traffic is low to none for the old pages and tags but they are listed in the search engines

What would make more sense:

a) keep the old pages and tags as they are
b) 301 redirect pages and tags to the new pages and tags
c) update the pages with a link pointing to the new versions?
d) something else?

phranque

11:00 am on Jan 21, 2010 (gmt 0)

i would do what provides the best experience for the visitor and what is most relevant to the content.
if you visitor is looking for widget 2.0 content and you redirect the visitor to widget 3.0 content, that's not so nice.
i would guess that the best answer may be to create fresh content for widget 3.0 subjects, maybe even reworking some old widget 2.0 posts with updated content to reflect the changes.
wherever it makes sense you should link 2.0 content to the relevant 3.0 content.
you might consider creating a "widget" tag for any content about widget where the specific version of widget is irrelevant.

vandread

2:31 pm on Jan 21, 2010 (gmt 0)

phrangue I agree that it would not make lots of sense from a user standpoint of the subject was still searched and requested by users. But what if there is no interest anymore in widget 2.0 because everyone moved on to widget 3.0 ?