Hey, Situation : I'm running a sweepstakes listing site powered by Wordpress. When I found a cool sweepstakes somewhere, I post it on my site. Once the sweepstakes is ended, I delete the post. So, my posts usually stay online between 1 to 6 months long. Result : My site and posts are pretty well ranked in Google because of the popular content. Main Question : What is the effect of deleting those posts on SEO once the sweepstakes are over ? Sub-Questions : Do you think I could rank better if I don't delete them ? Could I have a better pagerank or something if I don't delete them ? Thanks ! P.S. I don't post my site url because I don't want to "spam" but feel free to PM me if you need it to better understand what I'm talking about.
I'd probably keep the pages, but put them in an archive of "previous sweepstakes" (and make them read-only) so people can see what was being offered beforehand. As for your questions, it's going to depend on the pages, but I can tell you right now you're going to have a pretty beefy server log full of 404 errors that could cause problems with the search engines if you're not very careful.
Dont delete the post just edit the top of it saying that its closed. Its never a good idea to delete content that brings in links and traffic. Use it to your advantage.
Once the content is indexed and if you delete or add few lines it will be difficult to re-index the whole content, if you do any addition or deletion consider adding to publish the whole content again. This was recently discussed on the google online seminar, those who have attended might have been noted this.
This is great advice. Never delete content just keep adding to it. Remember content is king and volume of content can boost PR.
I own a website named sweepstakesmania. The URL is sweepstakesmania.com. I never delete any of my posts, and instead I place them into my expired category. This way the search engines will still find them and give me traffic from them.