Best Practice For Retiring RSS Feeds?

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 17, 2009 @01:57AM from the cleaning-up-in-advance dept.

GBJ writes "I work for an organisation that runs seasonal online competition events. Each event has its own news feed which becomes obsolete shortly after the event finishes. We're still getting RSS requests for some events as far back as 2004. I'd like to close a few thousand old feeds and remove the resource hit they cause, but I'm not sure what is the best approach. Currently I'm considering just returning a 404, but I have no idea if there is a better way to handle this. Uncle Google hasn't turned anything up yet, but sometimes it's hard to find something when you don't know what it's called ..."

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Discontinued Notice Increased Traffic by maclizard · 2009-03-17 02:48 · Score: 5, Informative

My company has had the same issue. We just wrote out a single item feed that explained that the feed had been discontinued and provided a link to the homepage. We wrote this feed over all the feeds to be taken down.
Interestingly, in the weeks following this action, our homepage views spiked followed shortly after by increased hits on more active feeds.