The day started off like all others, I woke up late, rubbed my eyes, rolled over in bed and opened up my laptop.

What I found was a bit disturbing though, it appears that Chicago Tribune has caused some customer service issues due to expired content. How? Well to answer that question, we have to turn to Twitter.

You see, @ourmaninchicago, @LeahJones and @chicagocarless had a conversation that touched on a rather significant frustration that has been looming around Tribune’s sites for a while now—content expiration!

Why in the world would Tribune expire its content? After all, they are a news organization. A collection of information with print archives going back to the 1800s. Why in the world would they expire their online content? It’s simple . . .

1. The server load to run massive databases that are necessary to keep every article.
   1. Literally thousands of articles per day are created or fed into Tribune Company (keep in mind Tribune owns a number of news organizations including L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, two Florida papers, a few more along the east coast, and a dozen or more broadcast companies as well).
   2. When Tribune came online over 10 years ago, the infrastructure and costs were wildly different. Much of the same code developed then, is still being used today.
2. Partnerships and contracts with 3^rd parties
   1. The value of inbound links and keeping customers on Tribune domains wasn’t a focus over the years. Thus contracts were entered into (sorry no details).
3. Lack of focus and understanding of the SEO implications of expiring content.
   1. The online divisions of the newspapers and broadcast sites are a recent focus. The focus and understanding of SEO is even more recent.

There are a lot of little reasons that can all funnel up into those three big reasons that float around through the company, but those are the big ones and in that order that I hear almost every week.

So, I’m the SEO Director at Tribune . . . I should fix it, right?? Agreed!

This is where we are at so far on this:

1. We have our two largest sites up with some type of Archive News sites.
   1. http://articles.latimes.com
      1. Only print articles and USUALLY a 301 redirect from the original published URL directs you to the correct page on the ‘articles’ server.
      2. How many articles and how far back? Good question! No more than 10 years (via this project, you may find stragglers) and most articles are within the past few years.
         1. Google index stats: 1.4 million pages (mostly articles)
   2. http://archives.chicagotribune.com
      1. All online content that Chicago Tribune was the original creator of (non-AP, or wire stories) is on the ‘archive’ server. The 301 redirects don’t work as well though and occasionally you may not be able to find the story you are looking for. We are working on it, but it’s far from perfect.
      2. How many articles and how far back? Only a couple of years . . . for now.
         1. Google index stats: 218,000 pages (mostly articles)
2. The technology used for the two sites above can be used to create a similar system on other Tribune news sites.
   1. There are some things that need to be done first (can’t get into details), then these archive sites can be built for other Tribune news sites.
3. All of our blogs posts are saved for as long as the blog is still active
   1. I’m working on setting a policy on what should be done with blogs that are no longer updated (if anything). However, this must be done smartly and justly.
      1. There are literally thousands of medium PageRank pages sitting out there and I want to make sure that any redirects that may occur go to a proper home for both the human experience and search engine experience.

Bottom line? By the end of the year I will have all of the newspaper sites with some sort of archive site. It won’t be the most perfect but it will help significantly in solving the massive number of 404 errors I look at in Google Webmaster Tools (one domain below). Keep in mind these numbers used to be in the high hundreds of thousands when I started with Tribune in February 2008. Progress is being made . . . much more work to be done though.

How much traffic are the article/archive servers generating for us? Well, I’m not going to do a screenshot for that, but I will mention that they equate to less than 3% of our total traffic. So despite how people feel this is ‘must have’ content. The numbers are hard to justify when we have other projects that can easily trump 15% lift in traffic. But it is really important for SEO because there are literally millions of dead links on the internet that could be driving PageRank to the Tribune network of sites. As an SEO, I am very frustrated by it, but I also see from a product standpoint other things in the hopper may be a higher priority.

Again, I’ll have all the Tribune newspaper sites with an archive system by the end of the year. I’ll try to be patient if you will.

Note: Still unedited, sorry for typos…