While perusing our site, you may come across an old page that has a banner something like this:

This ship has sailed …

This webpage describes one video of hundreds hosted on this website. HOWEVER …

This video has been removed from our collection HOWEVER, there’s a new version that covers even more recent content … blah blah blah.

I keep these around because, just like every other website on the internet, I rely on search engines to deliver traffic. No one really knows how search engines work internally, but here’s some things I HEARD that affected my decision:

(1) Search engines don’t like when pages disappear … that casts a dark cloud of unreliability over the entire site. Or, at least, it’s possible.

(2) Search engines love content and many of these pages the describe older videos have nice, juicy keywords and are already indexed. And yeah, ok, so I don’t offer THAT particular video anymore, but this page was indexed by a search engine and there’s probably something on the site that is NEWER and I needed some way to direct people from pages describing the old videos to pages describing the new videos. This is what I came up with.

(3) Over time, I needed a way to reliably deprecate content and point to new content. Again, this is what I came up with. Creating “versions” of videos is tricky business.