Moderation issue: Archived topics + Google

Hi Maxime, back when we were on another platform (GetSatisfaction) there was a time when we did the same thing. Our team decided which topics were deemed useful or not to others, and the non-useful ones were 'archived'. Doing so was problematic, though, in a number of ways. On a community it's hard to justify to someone who has spent time asking a question or creating content that you've decided to remove that content because you've decided it's not going to be useful to others. We found that community users reacted badly. Particularly if the thread was recent it's likely to feel like censorship or overly heavy-handed moderation. My opinion of this kind of approach was that we were trying to manage the community like we would a knowledge base. These are fundamentally very different things.

I do think there's a case to be made for removing very old content, though (e.g. we have content going back 10+ years - some of which is definitely not relevant or useful today). So to try and answer your question, maybe the best and easiest solution is to adjust your 'this topic no longer exists' message to something that explains the likely reasons for a topic on your community no longer being visible. Part of that could be the explanation you've been posting reactively.

I think you make some good points Kenneth and that could be a good solution!

Alternatively Google will eventually re-index your community so these topics will not appear in searches but that can take some time. So if its not a huge number of topics you could also remove them manually with Google's Webmaster tool here, so then straight away they shouldn't appear in the Search index. But if you've archiving a lot of content then Kenneth's idea could be best.

I agree that it is better to adjust the notification. Perhaps this gives some more understanding to the topic starter. If Google does not eventually show the archived topics in the search results, that will also resolve the issue.

Thank you both for your tips and experiences. They are very helpful! 🙂

@Shane1 I know this is an old post, but I was looking for information on archiving old posts on our own community, and I don’t see an archive option. Am I missing it, or are you referring to the option to Close a Topic? 

Also, I’m curious if inSided has any recommendations on when to archive conversations, as well as a method to identify posts for potential archival. 

Hi Lila,

good that you ask this question, as we recently have released some features which help you with archiving content.

But first of all, you of course need to identify which content is ready to be archived, and which content is better to be updated instead. We have learned that this can differ a lot between communities, but mostly it all boils down to how outdated the content is and how popular it is amongst visitors.

How outdated is the content?

Is the content so outdated that an update is not going to help? For example, your community might cover content about products that do not exist anymore. This content then could be archived, as it is irrelevant to most users. Other pieces of content might just need an update to reflect the current state of your product.

I see that most communities start archiving content when it is older than 1-2 years. But again, this also depends on how quickly your product changes and information becomes outdated...

In case you can identify entire categories that are not relevant any more, you can read further below how to hide these categories from Google and from your community search. And in case you want to update that content, I have written down some tips on how to do this best in this comment.

How popular is the content?

You should make sure that you are not de-indexing those topics which are driving organic traffic to your community, or in general content which you know is still actively visited a lot. So the amount of views of a topic also play a role here. It is difficult to give an universal statement on how many views should make you decide to keep a topic, as this differs a lot per community. If a topic has much more views than others (e.g. more than 50%), I would not recommend to archive these topics, but rather update them as well or at least point them to more up-to-date content.

If you have identified a small number of topics which you still want to keep, but the rest can be archived, you can also decide to move the entire category to an archive category and then move those popular topics back to another category.

How to archive content

We recently have added functionality which allows you to set the SEO settings of categories on your community. Next to meta tags, you can also decide wether or not Google should crawl and/or index the content of a category. You can find these settings in the category edit page, under “SEO settings”. In case you want to hide the content from Google, you should set it to “nofollow/noindex”. Then content will not be listed in search results any more. In case you also want to hide it from your community search, you have a tickbox to do just that.

A best practice that more mature communities have adopted is to have archive categories for each Q&A category. So the “product A” category then also has a “product A archive”. This makes it easy for users to also browse for older content about this product. Some have the archive located in the same parent category, but others choose to have a dedicated archive parent category at the bottom of the list (better choice in my opinion).

Others choose to have a single archive category, where all old content lands in. The downside is that it easily becomes a pile of old content about everything, so it is not ideal for the navigation experience. However, as the search within this category will allow users to search, this is not as big of an issue as it might seem.

I hope that this helps you a bit in finding your strategy to archiving content. If you have any other specific questions around this at this point, please let me know so that I can help.