How do I move old content down in the search engine rankings? <p>There is <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/58484/getting-good-google-pagerank">some</a> <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/585175/google-pagerank-does-it-count-per-domain-or-per-webpage">precedent</a> for search-engine-ranking-related questions on StackOverflow, so please don't close this question. It's programming-related to the extent that HTML META tags can be called "programming".</p> <p>Here's the problem:</p> <p>We make <a href="http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">FogBugz</a>, the software project planning and bug tracking suite.</p> <p>Either we did a great job with our old documentation or a crummy job with our new documentation, but for most of the popular searches on FogBugz terms, documentation for our old versions comes up.</p> <p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=fogbugz+delete+shared+filter" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Here's an example</a>. For context, our current FogBugz version is FogBugz 7. The top two results for that search are for FogBugz 5, which is positively ancient.</p> <p>As best I can tell, there are several options for getting these results out of the top slots, but each has problems:</p> <ul> <li>A <code>NOINDEX</code> tag, but what happens if someone is actually searching for help on an old version?</li> <li>Finding the incoming links to the old documentation and placing a <code>NOFOLLOW</code> on them to deprive the old docs of PageRank. Problem here is that it's really fiddly to find the links to the content, rather than changing the content itself.</li> <li>The <code>unavailable_after</code> tag, which is just a time-delayed <code>NOINDEX</code>, with the same problem of removal rather than demotion.</li> </ul> <p>I just want these old documentation versions to stop competing with our current versions, without being completely unavailable.</p>