This week we got a call from a station asking if their news posts could be set to automatically expire after a certain day and time. For example, you post a local news story about a new farmer's market being held in your town square this Saturday.  On Sunday, the news story will be old news and you'll run the risk of someone reading and thinking that it's the following Saturday instead of the one that just passed.  So, their question is a valid one. 

However, there are certain implications to consider when you remove any content from your website.  When Google indexes website content so that it can be found in search results, they expect it to be valid.  When someone clicks on a search result and they find a "page missing" error, the search engine gets a pingback saying errors were found. Therefore, they penalize your entire site for the content no longer being there. 

I've always been told to never remove anything from the internet because it will hurt the search engine optimization of your website. I can understand that for major things like switching domains or major pages with information that lots of people see and use on a regular basis, or even a news story with significant historical value.  But for a news story about a date-specific farmer's market event? 

As a radio station, I believe it's safe to assume that your listeners and website readers are most concerned with what happened recently, what's happening right now, and what could be affecting them in the coming days.  It would be much different if you were a business blogging about how to properly change a tire, repair a window, or paint a fireplace.  That type of content is more evergreen than the daily news content we are likely populating our websites with. If you are producing new content daily as you should, then any hit you may receive from Google from a missing post from a year ago should be inconsequential, because you're delivering more relevant content each day to replace it. 

A year or so ago, Hubspot CRM recently deleted 3000 posts from their blog and their SEO improved dramatically: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/remove-outdated-content. 

"PublishPress Future", formerly "Post Expirator" is a free plugin that can help you with that: https://wordpress.org/plugins/post-expirator. 

The Search Engine Journal did a fantastic article a few years ago titled, "How & Why You Must Improve or Remove Your Old Content": https://www.searchenginejournal.com/improve-remove-old-content/300961.

Should you remove old content?  Our stand is "yes", especially if the content is news-related, not historical or evergreen in nature, and older than a year.  There's really no reason to keep it on your site.  Removing old content can help your website from a server perspective as your backups will be smaller and much easier to re-instate if your website ever goes down. 

Do you need help with your radio station website, reach out to us at skyrocketradio.com.