Dealing with expired content - AP, Reuters, etc.

[Dj Morri]

Hi,

I work for a huge site, more than 4 million pages and now after 8 years of being online, some of our content needs to expire due to negotiations with News Agencies such as AP, Reuters, etc. How you deal wit that expired content when we already have tons of links to those pages? Place a 404? At the same time we cant redirect to the most related content because there are thousands, it will take years to match some new content, any advice?

[AussieWebmaster]

would have category pages created for the 301 redirects - niched and specific that you can point large numbers of pages to and then use those category pages to point out to various new pages - you even get to control the anchor text to those pgaes