Spring Cleaning 2025
Housekeeping to Improve Site Speeds and Indexing
Outdated Events in particular, along with outdated Content, unused Files and unused Tags clutter your database and slow down site searches. They also end up listed in Google Search Console reports as "pages not indexed" and 404 errors. Those pages shouldn't be indexed and 404s neither harm your ranking nor do they lead to a negative user experience in this case. They aren't broken links but rather so-called soft 404s.
Nonetheless, it can be disconcerting to see a lengthy list of URLs in the report and make it very difficult to use the report to find any real broken links. Read more about how to interpret Google Search Console Page Indexing reports here: Google Search Console: Redirects & Pages Not Indexed.
We recommend that you clean out your database regularly using our special features for this housekeeping purpose.
Expired Content & Events
Metro Publisher offers a convenient expiration date option on Content and Events to let you hide those outdated items on the public website side.
Log in as Admin and navigate to Settings > Content to activate this feature.
This feature does not delete expired Content or Events, however, since you may choose to update or otherwise "reactivate" a particular piece. The pieces remain published but are hidden from view for your readers. They are not placed in draft mode!
A piece of Content or an Event that is truly expired and no longer relevant should be deleted, however, in order to reduce query times for searches of your own database and to sever connections to other places and tasks in the system that take Expired Content and Events into consideration. The same counts for searches on the public side. Any published Content or Event is still searched when readers use search functions or filters and after running the search the system still has to read out the expiration date and hide those items.
To easily find expired Events, please log in to your work site as Editor and navigate to Events > Expired Events.
The 50 oldest Events in the system will be listed first and will be already highlighted, i.e. preselected, so that all you have to do is click the “Delete” option. Then the next 50 will load and so forth.
Unused Images
Unused Files, i.e. images, can also be found efficiently by appending /filecenter/unused_files.html to your admin website URL, e.g. mywebsite-admin.metropublisher.com/filecenter/unused_files.html
This is currently a hidden page, meaning there is no tab for it in the work site menu.
Unused Tags
Unused Tags should also be removed since that they can lead to so-called soft 404 errors, which will appear as 404s in Google Indexing reports. Pages with little or no content are considered soft 404s, because they exist but are basically empty.
To make this process more efficient Metro Publisher provides an overview table of your unused Tags. Log in as Editor and navigate to the Tags > Unused Tags tab.
A limited number of the oldest Tags in the system will be listed first and will be already highlighted, i.e. preselected, so that all you have to do is click the “Delete” option. Then the next set will load and so forth.
Any created Tag automatically generates a corresponding Topics Page with links to content with that Tag. An unused Tag therefore generates an empty Topics Page. Be especially aware of automatically created Tags from hardcoded metadata when uploading stock photo images: Auto-generated Tags Due to Metadata on Images and Stock Photo Uploads.
