How to treat old promotional news?

[Assafros]

I have an affiliate site with more than 2000 old news pages which are index with Google. Most of those news articles were relevant for the time they were uploaded, but in most cases they are not relevant any more, don’t have any search engine ranking and they are not getting any direct traffic.

How do you think should I treat those old news:

1. Keep them as they are.
2. put no index meta for the ones that are not relevant any more
3. remove those pages completely and put 404.
4. 301 redirect the old promotional news to the home page.

Thanks,
Assaf

[universal4]

#2, #3 and #4 reduces the number of indexed pages.

I would not do any of the above, but go through them as you get time and put a direct link to more current news pages.

This would keep the content indexed and send real visitors to more current pages, and help the bots find and index more current pages.

Rick
Universal4

[baldidiot]

What Rick said!

Other thing you could do (depending on your set up) is have an automatically generated message for promotions older than x days or promos that have ended where you say 'This Promotion Has Ended, For Current Promotions Click Here'. Or have a feed of links to your most recent promos.