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What to do with "trendy" content that is no longer relevant?
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Hi all,
My company is in the fashion/jewelry industry and we regularly create short content describing the latest trends in jewelry. We do not include any sort of date reference on the content, which means that a searcher who gets to our site has no way of knowing if this is a trend from 2008 or 2016.
Does anyone have any experience with the best way to handle this? I want to remain relevant for our customers. It seems like a big disservice to our customers to show them a "trend" which trended 5 years ago. Is there a benefit to keeping this content around or would it be better to cycle it off the site after 6 months or so?
Thanks for any advice or experience you have!
R.
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We generally recommend keeping all of that content on the website, there are only a few cases where you would want to remove the content (for example if there are copyright or legal issues involved). Your site, over time, will become larger, and this is a good thing.
Fashion trends tend to come back, so in 5 or 10 years if you still have that content on the site it may become relevant again. And, if it's been there for 10 years then there is a good chance that it will rank well--because it's been there 10 years and it's trusted.
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For me, this all depends on whether or not that content has any backlinks and/or gets good search traffic. If neither, then I'd remove it. But if people are still really actually finding the page through long-tail search, then maybe it doesn't matter too much if the trend is from 2008 since people still like it enough to search it out.
If it's linked or has social shares but currently gets no engagement, 301 it to the most relevant content that does. Logan mentions that can dilute the link juice, but you'd be directing it to a place that people actually want to go, so I think you'll be fine there. If it has no links, no social shares, and gets no traffic, it's just dead weight that dilutes your content quality. I'd rather have Google seeing high engagement with all corners of my site rather than just a small number of pages.
The point is that I think you'd do well to pay attention to what your readers are actually engaging with and let that be your guide on whether a particular piece of content stays or goes.
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Learn which of these posts pull traffic or are consumed by on-site visitors. Find out which pull entry traffic that processes through the cart. Make more similar posts.
After that you will be left with some duds. These can be improved or deleted.
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I'd recommend keeping it on the site. This type of content has a good chance at garnering some quality links, so you don't want to dilute their value by redirecting.
Since your content is very time-relevant, it would be very beneficial to your users to include this information. It could also help with organic long-tail queries, in the case where someone searchers 'fashion trends for summer 2016'. You're currently not providing the date information, so your chances of appearing for that query are much lower than if you had date-published info directly on the page.
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