I have 2 major concerns about my classified website's SEO that I would like to discuss with you. My website (PR6) gets about 80 classifieds per day and has more than 100.000 subpages indexed in Google, though it doesn't rank well for natural search against e-commerce websites. Keep in mind that all classified ads expire after few days (items get sold). What to do with these expired classifieds = long tail keyword pages? 1. Leave them in category result pages (still link to them from category result pages = link juice) OR remove them from category result pages (no link from category result pages) 2. Add additional content with links to newer active classifieds OR 301 redirect them to newer active classifieds / category pages The point is that sooner or later there will be a newer classifieds with a similar title. And from what I have concluded, Google displays newer classifieds in the SERPs, no matter how hard I try to link to the old ones to make them rank better for the keyword in the title. But, in Google Webmaster Tools all main categories (pages that show up in SERPs) have sitelinks which are represented by (link to) very old classifieds, probably to those that I was working SEO on (have more incoming links). So what to do with all those old expired classifieds that should be the main source of search engine traffic? Should I still link to them form category results pages or not? How to outrank e-commerce websites which have product pages that are old but still live (getting reviews etc.)? What is the right strategy?
I sort of thought 301 redirecting to the category page once expired might be a good idea, but if I am reading this right you prefer to still get the long tail traffic into that expired ad. Is there a way to change the expired ad page? Here's my thought: 1. Ad Expires 2. Page changes to a different page still keyword rich that retains the same title. 3. The page reads something like "This Person Sold Their Wiget on {INSERT SITE NAME} and you can too! <CLICK HERE TO POST A CLASSIFIED AD> 4. Then a table appears with several similar ads from that category maybe triggered by keywords. 5. Include your main search box so that visitor doesn't leave the page instead of searching when they see that ad expired. 6. In the upper right put a graphic that says something like UPDATED or NEW Ads so that you can get some users to click onto a different page (Helps make the bounce rate go down so the indexed page moves up or stays up) This is just an idea, not really sure if it helps or not.