My site has many URL of online ads. with time goes by, many of them are expired and they are taken offline which means they are invisible from public. these URLs of expired ads have no inbound links any more. what do the expired URL impact the SEO of the website? especially they are still submitted to Google crawler through the sitemaps.xml. are they considered as low-quality pages and lower the ranking of my site?

Expired URLs can indeed impact the SEO of your website, especially if they are still being submitted to Google through your sitemap.xml file. Here’s how these URLs can affect your site:

1. Index Bloat

• Impact: When expired URLs are still included in your sitemap, they can cause what is known as “index bloat.” This happens when search engines index many low-quality or irrelevant pages, diluting the overall quality of your website’s indexed content. This can reduce your website’s SEO performance because Google prefers sites with high-quality, relevant content.
• Solution: Regularly audit your sitemap.xml file to ensure that it only includes live, relevant pages. Remove expired URLs to avoid index bloat.

2. Crawl Budget Wastage

• Impact: Google allocates a crawl budget to each site, which determines how many pages it will crawl within a given time. If your crawl budget is being spent on expired or low-quality URLs, it means fewer important pages might get crawled and indexed. This can negatively affect your site’s visibility in search results.
• Solution: By removing expired URLs from your sitemap, you can ensure that your crawl budget is used efficiently on high-quality pages that matter for SEO.

3. Perception of Low-Quality Content

• Impact: Google’s algorithm evaluates the overall quality of a site’s content. If your site has a significant number of expired URLs that lead to low-quality or empty pages, it may lower the perceived quality of your entire site. Google may interpret this as a sign of poor content management, which could harm your rankings.
• Solution: Implement 301 redirects from expired ad URLs to relevant, existing content or a category page. If there’s no relevant page, return a 410 (Gone) status code, signaling to Google that the page is permanently removed.

4. User Experience Issues

• Impact: Even if expired URLs are no longer visible to the public, if they accidentally get indexed and users land on them, it can create a poor user experience. This could increase your bounce rate and lower your engagement metrics, which are indirect ranking factors.
• Solution: Prevent expired URLs from being accessible or indexed. Use the robots.txt file to block crawlers or serve 404/410 status codes.

5. Negative Impact on Site Structure and Authority

• Impact: Expired URLs that used to have internal or external links can disrupt your site’s structure and diminish the authority that these pages once contributed.
• Solution: Conduct a link audit and update or remove internal links pointing to expired URLs. Consider finding new content to repurpose the expired URLs, or set up appropriate redirects.

Key Actions for Improvement:

• Remove expired URLs from the sitemap.xml immediately.
• Audit and update internal links across your site to eliminate links pointing to expired URLs.
• Set up 301 redirects or use 410 status codes for removed pages, depending on the context.
• Use Google Search Console to monitor and manage indexed pages, and request removal of outdated URLs.

By managing expired URLs effectively, you can maintain a high-quality site structure that is both user-friendly and search engine optimized.