Most modern Content Management System (CMS) software offers some form of 'auto-archive' functionality. Put quite simply, it will move your older content to an 'archive', effectively doing some housekeeping to make room for newer, more current articles, while ensuring the article is still accessible if searched for at some future date.
When Auto-Archive Is NOT Your Best Friend
There are times, however, when the usefulness or relevance of a given article is not diminished by the passage of time. Archiving them might appear a digital parallel to wheeling ones elders off to an old-folks home the day after they retire!
And there are some articles that are simply so popular (hopefully like this one!), that they seduce visitors to return later on, or have viral properties that cause their readers to inform their freinds and colleagues to read them.
Yet others simply rank so highly in the search engines that they can be identified as what one might consider 'life-blood content' - content that, if removed, would starve the site in question of valuable traffic.
So, what should one do?
Again, most CMS systems will allow you to set an 'expiration date' for your content. Simply setting this to some far-off date, such as 1/1/2100, will ensure the content have a permanent shelf-life on your site. OK, so maybe that's not permanent (just a littleless than 93 years away at the time of writing!), but I'd be willing to take a gamble that your site won't still be running on the same CMS platform then that it is now!
But, my 'Life-Blood Content' has already been archived!
No matter! Again, most CMS systems will allow you to edit even the archived content, and adjust the expiration date, making the content 'fresh' once again!
OK, so what else should I know?
Something many open source CMS systems allow you to do is develop 'modules' or 'add-ons' of your own, and indeed some have thriving user communities that develop and support such 'add-ons' by the truck load! Elbow has been instrumental in developing add-ons for various CMS packages that allow you to automatically guage the success of a given page by recording how many search engine visitors are referred to it over a pre-determined time-frame after it is initially indexed. Those pages with the most referrals can be assumed to be your 'life-blood content', whereas those pages with few or no referrals can be happily sent to the archives for the occasional interested visitor.
Make sure your archives don't suck up all of your PageRank!
As an aside, we also recommend linking to your most popular content from various places in your website, whereas your archive should not receive so many links. Careful management of your links will allow you to preserve precious PageRank for your 'popular pages', keeping it from being soaked up and wasted on 'less popoular' ones. As the whole topic of linking is outside the realms of this article, we'll not discuss it any further here, but there are many articles already written and publically available on the subject.
One final suggestion is to consider using the "rel=nofollow" parameter in your anchor href tags to stop the leaking of valuable PageRank to those older archives.
