Dealing with expired content

Marketing
1

Hi there,

i have a sort of classifieds website, content is user generated but everything that is posted has an expiry date - so the user posts about his garage sale on the 19. december, and after this date this posting wont show up anymore in listings, categories etc. on my site. The page itself (listing.php?id=1234) will not show the original post anymore, but display a “Listing expired” instead without showing the original posting. This is done to prevent abuse, since a lot of people post phone numbers or emails there.

In google wmt i get all the urls to listing.php?id=1234 listed as “restricted by robots.txt”, which is correct because the cms adds

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />

to all expired listings.

Is there a way to better utilize those “dead” pages so that it would make sense to get them indexed, since i have ~15k pages “restricted by robots.txt”? I already show a list of similar (current) listings at the bottom; however this only works for big cities, but not in small places where i wont have “similar listings” most of the time.

What else could i do with those pages, and how would i fill it up with somewhat useful content?
And no; i don’t wanna cramp it full of ads.

2

Hi KeepItHamsta. Welcome to SitePoint. :slight_smile:

This may be off topic, but are you sure you want those old pages to remain on the site? Many CMSs out there allow for posts/pages that disappear after a certain date. Seems neater to me. Just my 2c.

3

For the content which you already had I don’t have any Idea but for your future content you can add additional feature which asks users TO SHOW LISTING AFTER EXPIRY DATE ? if they say yes then just remain it as it and if they say no then do it the way you doing now

4