: How can I inform search engines that the usefulness of some content on my site has a limited shelf life? Let's say that I run a forum dedicated to computer hardware. Naturally, people are

@Samaraweera270

At least as far as Google is concerned, there's already a "freshness" element to the algorithm, whereby it will attempt to surface the most relevant, up-to-date result for a given query. Their announcement even gives a similar example to the one you cite (a search for "best SLR camera").

So from that point of view, Google should be able to work this out without you needing to do anything different.

Of course, this also answers your second question about signalling that there's newer, possibly more relevant information on your site. If there are 2 pieces of content on your site about "best laptop", one from 2007 and one from 2012, the latter should perform better in search results.

EDIT: Hot off the press, Matt Cutts of Google discussing freshness in more depth.

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@Welton855

Ideally if you have high-ranking outdated pages you should try to update them so they stay relevant, letting you take advantage of the high rankings. However that advice is more applicable for blog posts than user-generated forum content. In your case, I would probably see if I could add years to the titles of older posts, so that they would show up in search results like this:

What is the best laptop for running Linux (2007)


Or

What is the best video card for under 0 (2008)


This will tell searchers that the content is outdated, and should go towards your stated goal of reducing bounce rates on such posts.

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@Correia994

Why would you want to do that? Say you put a lot of effort into
example.com/what-is-the-best-laptop-running-linux-flavour

and got lot's of backlinks, mentions, likes, ...

and a superb ranking.

If the content ages you should aim for leaving the great ranking as is, copy/clone/archive the page to say
example.com/what-is-the-best-laptop-running-linux-flavour-in-2011

but, under the canonical url, just update the content to be still useful, accurate, up-to-date. Link to the "archive", to the now "2011" content page.

Say you invented a new smartphone that becomes a great success and you promoted it with
example.com/the-great-new-xyz-smartphone

It will gain a lot of coverage, backlinks, etc. and a good ranking. If you offer a new smartphone generation one year later it might happen that your search term "xyz smartphone" lists still the "old" content ("/the-great-new-xyz-smartphone") and not your new product page. Just because the old one ranks way better than the new one. But hey, it ranks well so... You would just update the content or redirect with 301 status codes to the "new" content URI.

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@Courtney195

Well, search engines know your page is old, especially if this is a forum with all the post dates. You can't tell them directly you want them to derank the page and rank another page from the forum (at least for the head queries, like "What is the best laptop for running [os]").

What you can do is editing the first post of a given discussion, and put a small disclaimer and a link to the newest discussion about it. It will take time though, but this should be the best solution for visitors and SE.

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