Thoughts on archiving content on an event site?
-
I have a few sites that are used exclusively to promote live events (ex. tradeshows, conference, etc). In most cases these sites content fewer than 100 pages and include information for the upcoming event with links to register. Some time after the event has ended, we would redesign the site and start promoting next years event...essentially starting over with a new site (same domain).
We understand the value that many of these past event pages have for users who are looking for info from the past event and we're looking for advice on how best to archive this content to preserve for SEO.
We tend to use concise urls for pages on these sites. Ex. www.event.com/agenda or www.event.com/speakers. What are your thoughts on archiving the content from these pages so we can reuse the url with content for the new event? My first thought is to put these pages into an archive, like www.event.com/2015/speakers. Is there a better way to do this to preserve the SEO value of this content?
-
I think Egol covers it very well.
I would not be changing pages if at all possible. What I would be considering is how to get the benefit/value of traction of 2015 pages for 2016 events. There are several options.
But it could be a revamped page, a CTA which you can click on to go to 2016 page etc. Also if no page up yet after every 2015 event, you could put on the page "the 2016 events details are not known yet, however leave your email and we will contact you with details of the new event etc" - that gives an opportunity to collate details. You know your business better than anyone, so likely better strategies but the underlying principles enunciated by Egol is the way to go.
-
I have a few pages that link to content on other websites that are annual events. For many of these events, our website refers more visitors to them than they get from any other source. Sometimes more than from all of their other sources combined.
Some of the people who put on these events maintain the same URL year after year. We really appreciate that because we don't have to edit our page. Others change the year in the URL which is slightly annoying but easy. Others make up a new URL that places the event somewhere on the rump of their website where we have difficulty finding it. Others do insane redirects that often don't work properly.
My message here is really to say that if you value traffic from other websites then it is not a good idea to move your event page to a new URL every year. Doing that will orphan links, annoy the people who link to you, and might be inconsiderate to the people who help you promote the event on their own websites. Moving the URL around is also a really bad idea from an SEO perspective because you divide your link equity.
What to do with the speakers list and other information that represents a single year? If you think this information will be consumed by visitors, linked to by other websites, or pull in traffic from search then archive it as you proposed. My choice of the URL would be www.event.com/speakers/2015/ instead of www.event.com/2015/speakers/ Why? that keeps all of the speakers information in the same folder. When you have the 2016 info you simply change the URL of the index page and republish the new information overtop of the old.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate Page Content
Hi, I am new to the MOZ Pro community. I got the below message for many of my pages. We have a video site so all content in the page except the video link would be different. How can i handle such pages. Can we place adsense AD's on these pages? Duplicate Page Content Code and content on this page looks similar or identical to code and content on other pages on your site. Search engines may not know which pages are best to include in their index and rankings. Common fixes for this issue include 301 redirects, using the rel=canonical tag, and using the Parameter handling tool in Google Webmaster Central. For more information on duplicate content, visit http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content. Please help me to know how to handle this.. Regards
On-Page Optimization | | Nettv0 -
Pre-launch site or not
We are going to set up a new site in four months. Historically we always set up a simple Wordpress "Pre-launch-site" with relevant texts to start ranking in the SERP. Anyone with experience of doing/not doing this and what is had led to? A site with relevant texts also should have incoming links, which needs more work.
On-Page Optimization | | fredrikahlen0 -
Linking Out To External Sites
Hi, All If I have created a (website, logo, email campaign) for a client and written an article about it with screen shots on my website and link to them with a (do-follow) link how does Google see the (do-follow) link? Regards to the sites they have one link in the footer on the home page, which is a (do-follow) back to our site. Also, the websites are not in my Niche.
On-Page Optimization | | deskjet0 -
The correct way to go from PHP site to HTML site?
I have a website fully coded in PHP and I am doing a re-design over to an HTML site. I searched through the Q&A and there were some conflicting answers. Some said you will need to 301 all the pages. Others said to use the .htaccess to parse all the files as html. What is the correct way I should go about this? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | reliabox0 -
Site Cleanup Operation
Hi, I hope you can help, I have been asked to look at a friends site that is simply shocking, but somehow ranks for its main target keywords, mainly because they are easy. But going through the site he has like 350 links on his menus that are all follow so I need to change them to nofollow, but should anything else normally be marked such as no index etc on a menu link. Also upon doing a Moz scan there are something like 250 missing meta descriptions from old blog posts. When I looked closer they had been using the blog section for posting relevant news headlines, but thats it, So he has 250 useless, low quality blog posts. My question is, what should I really do with them, ie delete, redirect, canonical etc. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks Paul
On-Page Optimization | | propertyhunter0 -
Duplicate Content - Meta Data for International Site Roll Out
Hi All, We have a site targeting Ireland, so all on-page SEO is completed and launched on the Irish site. We are now rolling out this site to the UK...how much of this content & SEO meta data has to be changed for Google to not recognise it as duplicate content? Site structure is as follows: http://www.domain.com/ie-en/ - Irish site http://www.domain.com/uk-en/ - UK site Or will it even be considered duplicate content as we have the uk and Irish signals in the subfolders, will be using geo targeting on webmasters, and will have UK specific addresses and phone numbers? We will be rolling this site out to may more countries so would be great to get this straight from the start so we don't waste time creating many versions of the meta data unnecessarily! Many thanks Emma
On-Page Optimization | | john_Digino0 -
Duplicate Content - Site Wide or Internet Wide?
Hello... I am creating a new website and i was wondering how you guys would define duplicate content? If my new site had the same page titles and descriptions as my existing site, would that be duplicate content? Or does duplicate content mean same titles and descriptions in the same site? I'm wondering if i can upload the same database (with page titles and descriptions and alt tags) to my new site or if that would be looked at as duplicate... Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Prime850 -
Seasonal site structure
Bit of a complicated one for anyone who likes a challenge.. We sell a range of products which are very seasonal, so therefore have a seasonal section within the store with the products categorized into their relevant categories. In additon to this i wanted to also create a feature of each season so in effect pull forward on to a new tab the relevant season ie: Valentine so that customers didn't have to hunt for the products by going via seasonal shop etc The problem is that my site urls display last-category/product-title so in effect as the seasons change these urls will be deleted. They do remain elsewhere in our catalogue.. Does this make sense?
On-Page Optimization | | LadyApollo0