Hey Tiou! :)
Yes, this surely is not an easy question to answer. 😃 I am also working through a lot of outdated material at the moment, however for the inSpired community the SEO performance is not that relevant, as all content is "private" for Google. ;)
I think that you can work around the fact that the date will not be correct any more. Simply put at the top of that topic (in bold) a notification that this topic has been updated. E.g.: "Updated: 24.04.2018" or "last updated: 24.04.2018".
You could then also add a comment to that topic, which informs that the topic has been updated (maybe even name what exactly has been updated). This way the topic will not just be "bumped" to the top of the subforum, but also the timestamp in the subforum overview will show a more recent date for the last activity.
I am not sure if this is the best way to do this, there might be better ways than what I am recommending... Let us know if you have more questions or concerns!
Cheers,
Julian
We're asking ourselves similar questions about old and inactive content.
Is there an advantage for leaving old engagement/discussion content? If the subject is now out of date or if the discussion failed to take off (or both), isn't it best to prune @Julian ?
In our community we have several ways of dealing with old content.
For outdated content that isn't incorrect, only not relevant anymore, we use "Archive" subforums and disable the comments. This way we keep the SEO power but we don't clog the "actual" community.
For outdated content that has wrong information but is still relevant, we update the articles and add manual timestamps ("Edited on XXXX: Information updated, ..."). This way we keep the SEO power and even strengthen it because Google likes when content is being updated.
For outdated content that has wrong information and isn't relevant anymore, we check the Google Analytics Statistics. We determine if we can afford to lose a few clicks or if the content is still being clicked enough. If we don't want to lose the SEO power, then we edit the article, stating that it contains old/wrong information, provide a link to a similar topic (or to a resource on the company website) and disable the comments.
Sounds like a good approach - will that archive subforum(s) be public @bjoern_schulze ?
Yes, we keep the archives public. Because the information isn't wrong, it is just outdated. So it is quite literally an "Archive". 😉
I've been out of the office for a few days, hence my delay in response...
I think the approach described by Björn is pretty close to how I would handle it.
I would recommend to make sure that all of your official content stays updated - as this is the content your users expect to be correct. User-generated content, if older, can be expected to be not as accurate after a while, so this has a lower prio in my book.
I like the approach to double-check the impact in GA, however to me a low view count within the topic page already is a good indicator to me that removing content will not hurt the SEO juice of the community too much. Nevertheless GA of course is a good reference for when in doubt.
We are looking into options to improve this, e.g. better indicator when topics have been updated for the last time, or maybe even some type of indication that you are looking at older content. Would be great to hear your thoughts around this!
I would recommend to make sure that all of your official content stays updated - as this is the content your users expect to be correct.
Love this, makes perfect sense and avoids duplicated content.
We have an old community (we'll be 15 years old in January
).
We are in the process of kinda re-thinking our community and battle with old content.
I would like hear what are your best practices in differentiating old and new content? Official and user-generated?
Do you tend to produce official content as articles? Do you guys modify older, still up-to-date, content in order for it to provide more answers to readers?
Love this conversation as I’m asking this to myself right now - our community is only 6 months old but I can see content management is going to be a big task.
Great suggestions above, but I wonder about process. Going back in time and reviewing thousands of threads is too time consuming. Any ideas about how to streamline content management?
Cheers.
Funny you mention this actually, as I was chatting with Tim about this earlier today.
Probably the single most important thing to consider, is making sure that the content which is in the main “live” areas remains correct and doesn’t get so badly outdated that it comes back to bite you later. The comments above definitely are great for helping you to plan ahead though. :)
In my personal opinion, there’s not much you can do to automate these processes outside of the bulk-actions that you can already do with inSided and other existing tools that can flag up outdated content. Automation can often help with many things, but unfortunately content management is something that is very difficult to automate reliably. You can definitely use automated methods to speed up manual tasks though, such as moving an entire category of content to the archive in one go.
But perhaps what might be worth considering, is the possibility of splitting up the workload across your team. It’s definitely very overwhelming to have just one team member tackle this kind of beast alone (and would take absolutely forever just to get current!), so perhaps break the load down to have one or more team members tackle each section that they’re assigned to and then divide things up as appropriate. If you work smarter rather than work harder, it won’t feel anywhere near as much of a challenge.
I’m afraid it really is something that will catch you eventually, but the secret is to avoid letting it get too overpowered without noticing.
Yeah I must say we are also struggling with this sometimes. I think most of what makes content outdated are changes in your own product. It can be challenging to find all pieces of content that mention items that have changed in the meantime. Good tagging (public or internal) can surely help with this, but it is not a guarantee that this will work for each situation that you find yourself in.
I can recommend doing a topic export if you are looking for topics which might are up for an update / archiving. By the hand of a topic title you at least get somewhat of an idea if e.g. a certain feature is covered in it. Of course you can drill down to certain categories or split topics amongst your colleagues to check and have them updated.
If that is not an option, I’d try to set a date limit for each category (e.g. the date a new release / major change has happened) and then archive all topics that are older than that. For a community that is just 6 months old I would not advise to do that (with an eye on the total content a younger community has), normally you look here at content that is at least a year old.
