Deleted Topic or News Articles

Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 5:55 pm

I looked, If the answer is here I didn't find it. If you can point me to it I would be grateful.

Occasionally I delete articles from Topics/News. In checking back links I discovered that many of them are still indexed in a lot of places. They lead to the proper site and they allow the surfer access to the site but they are empty vessels. Is there a way to repopulate these deleted articles with new information. They are already indexed and I am thinking they will quickly reflect the new information. I did not realize how many I have deleted over time, repopulating them seems a prudent thing to do. Thanks everyone.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

Interesting observation. I never thought much along these lines because I don't delete many articles. I wouldn't want to reuse them because that would be confusing because you would/could potentially have 2 different subject heading pointing to the same article number.

A better solution might be to issue a HEADER:
410 Gone

The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent. Clients with link editing capabilities SHOULD delete references to the Request-URI after user approval. If the server does not know, or has no facility to determine, whether or not the condition is permanent, the status code 404 (Not Found) SHOULD be used instead. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.

The 410 response is primarily intended to assist the task of web maintenance by notifying the recipient that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the server owners desire that remote links to that resource be removed. Such an event is common for limited-time, promotional services and for resources belonging to individuals no longer working at the server's site. It is not necessary to mark all permanently unavailable resources as "gone" or to keep the mark for any length of time -- that is left to the discretion of the server owner.

Another possible solution might be to issuea HEADER:
301 Moved Permanently in the event you archive them as opposed to deleting them

The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link references to the Request-URI to one or more of the new references returned by the server, where possible. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.

The new permanent URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s).

If the 301 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.

Note: When automatically redirecting a POST request after
receiving a 301 status code, some existing HTTP/1.0 user agents
will erroneously change it into a GET request.

Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 8:16 pm

The links lead to the website they should if I can't repopulate them I'll leave them be. Unless there is something detrimental to the site that I am unaware of. Any visitor may find something of use to them if they visit the site and the site got a legit visitor. The casual surfer still ends up where they were wanted and desired to go they simply have a blank page from which they have immediate access to the rest of the site. I'll stop deleting and figure out a way to reapply the article if nothing else.

RavensScripts

Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2008 6:59 am

If the link leads to a blank page the average user is likely to bounce back out again without visiting the rest of the site, because they have not found the information they are looking for.

I would recommend using Google Analytics and I suspect you will find those links have a high bounce rate.

I know it is too late now, but I would recommend not deleting articles unless you really have to. I am not an SEO expert, but I suspect having links indexed to content that is not there will have a detrimental impact on your rankings.