How to remove Content older than a specific date with 410 status code

Question

so I have a Joomla Website with a lot of content (10k+ items acumulated over the last 10 years).

I want to remove the Content of the first 5 Years because it costs a lot of Crawler Budget for Google. To do that I have to declare the page with the http 410 Status code - so it get permanently removed and google doesn't try to crawl it again and again.

So how can I manage that without editing each url by Hand? Is there a way to even remove Content in this way in joomla?

Answer 1

I have never had to do something like this before.
However, I just had a somewhat awkward but certainly simple idea which could work for you.

Create a template override for the article view in:

/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/html/com_content/article/default.php

In default.php, just below the defined('_JEXEC') or die;

add the following:

$time = strtotime("-5 years", time());
$date = date("Y-m-d", $time);


if ($this->item->created < $date) {
    JError::raiseError(410, "This page isn't available any more and will never be available again in the future");
}

What this does is that it compares if the article created date is older than 5 years. If so, it will raise the system error page of joomla with 410 status code and message: "This page isn't available any more and will never be available again in the future".

Test this somewhere before doing anything on your live website.