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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 ..."

3 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Retiring feeds by smittyoneeach · · Score: 5, Funny

    Retiring feeds
    A phase-out needs.
    As facial bristles,
    Or torn skin bleeds.
    Burma Shave

    --
    Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  2. 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    You should be able to do a 301 redirect to maybe some generic feed that just has one entry that says "This feed is out of date, please use try these feeds instead."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.
  3. Discontinued Notice Increased Traffic by maclizard · · 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.