I completely agree! Just because the content once existed doesn't mean it should stay on the web forever.

I'm also not quite sure how best to differentiate the two for internal search. Any thoughts?

If the content is important for internal users then it should be on the intranet not the internet. You could use statistics to show that no one is visiting old pages on the external website.

I help run a couple government intranet sites and let me tell you, we run into this all the time. I submitted an idea about standardization of CMS. If government IT pushed CMS development more, we could make a huge dent in this dated content problem. We need MORE people in government having the ability and tools to update DYNAMIC content and LESS people with their hand in the cookie jar when it comes to developing and/or administering sites (and inevitably overthinking and overengineering them!)

@tsritz - I think your standardization of CMS might be worth fleshing out into an idea of it's own. Also, your comment about dynamic content rings true. When something new happens, sure, put out some news item about it. But don't leave it there. Go find the content on your site that acts as the record on that topic and UPDATE it. Don't just add another layer.

@tsritz I also help run an intranet site as well as an internet site and I am constantly amazed at the amount of people who don't know the difference.

Yes - I've encountered this problem. And here's one model for dealing with it. Go to archives.hud.gov and you'll see a separate "archive" website of content that is important to researchers and for public record, but does not need to be updated and certainly shouldn't remain on the "live" website. Sam Gallagher came up with this idea, and I think it's a winner. You need to find some way to maintain important "ephemeral" content for transparency and research, but you don't need to weigh down a website (and a web team) with maintaining all that obsolete/outdated content.

@candi - That approach makes sense. In fiddling with the HUD search a tiny bit, it seems like the archives are included in search, but don't overwhelm the results. Favoring current content over archived content in results seems to make sense.

Yes, we've been wrestling with this bear too. We're trying to keep our ephemeral content (seasonal, political, event-specific on the blog) and our evergreen content on web pages. It works pretty well, but it gets a little hairy when it comes to page rank (our website pages far exceed our blog in terms of incoming links).

This is a really good comment, but I don't know of a practical way to deal with it. Usually teh evergreen stuff is the core website content ... online services, content about programs that only changes occasionally. You can deal with it in the design: placing "ephemeral" or "time-sensitive" [gosh I hate that term] in boxes, predictably in the template. But I'm not sure what kinds of policies need to be in place. What are you thinking?

I've thought about this for a while, and my biggest issue is the assumption that there are only two types of content: "new stuff" and "old stuff".

Instead of ranking content based on its perceived durability, it should be grouped according to its usefulness to the user, based on a known set of tasks or needs.

In short, a good information architecture (global/site map) and secondary taxonomy (keywords / cross-references) will enable this.

Some sections, like news or press releases, would most likely be sorted by date, but other more meaningful organization would be better for other less-time sensitive content.

coupled will a good home page layout, this will allow the most relevant information float to the top in some cases, and allow for intelligent curation otherwise.