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Best Practice For Retiring RSS Feeds?

Posted by timothy on 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 ..."

6 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. 301 by hansamurai · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You should be able to do a 301 redirect to maybe some generic feed that just has one entry that says "This feed is out of date, please use try these feeds instead." Or whatever you want to let them know.

    --
    Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
  2. Something simple by IMarvinTPA · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The most appreciative thing you could do for the preservation of history is to place static simple RSS files at those addresses that include a link to your archives for the event.

    IMarv

    --
    Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
  3. Aggregate? by Redfeather · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Are there more than one contest going at once, that there's a need for multiple feeds? Or, more appropriately, can some of this content not be removed completely? Keeping a full feed archive seems a bit of overkill, especially for closed events from five years ago. Why not PDF the event archive for downloading and keep a single feed for active items? Overpreparation is a growing problem I'm seeing on the web. Far too few people/events/businesses are prepared to minimize anything for the sake of optimization.

    --
    Those things you're doing with that stuff you just bought? That's not what it's for! -
  4. Re:but then you loose the traffic by Razalhague · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Dumping them with a 410 is a great way to loose your traffic.

    I'd like to close a few thousand old feeds and remove the resource hit they cause...

  5. Re:Discontinued Notice Increased Traffic by Yaur · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This seems like the way to go. Assuming that your website drives revenue somehow, throwing away traffic is not smart.

  6. Re:Retiring feeds by Larryish · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Forward them to a page listings current feeds, possibly with custom tailored advertisement-style links to events or other websites in your network.

    Never waste traffic. At the end of the day, traffic is KING.