Archiving a festival website - subdomain or directory?

[cos2030]

Hi guys

I look after a festival website whose program changes year in and year out. There are a handful of mainstay events in the festival which remain each year, but there are a bunch of other events which change each year around the mainstay programming.This often results in us redoing the website each year (a frustrating experience indeed!)

We don't archive our past festivals online, but I'd like to start doing so for a number of reasons

1. These past festivals have historical value - they happened, and they contribute to telling the story of the festival over the years. They can also be used as useful windows into the upcoming festival.

2. The old events (while no longer running) often get many social shares, high quality links and in some instances still drive traffic. We try out best to 301 redirect these high value pages to the new festival website, but it's not always possible to find a similar alternative (so these redirects often go to the homepage)

Anyway, I've noticed some festivals archive their content into a subdirectory - i.e. www.event.com/2012

However, I'm thinking it would actually be easier for my team to archive via a subdomain like 2012.event.com - and always use the www.event.com URL for the current year's event. I'm thinking universally redirecting the content would be easier, as would cloning the site / database etc.

My question is - is one approach (i.e. directory vs. subdomain) better than the other? Do I need to be mindful of using a subdomain for archival purposes?

Hope this all makes sense. Many thanks!

[Robin_Jennings]

I work with a lot of arts events on a minimal budget and I normally move the old website to: www.website.com.au/2011, www.website.com.au/2012 and make the current year www.website.com

In this way you're still getting benefit from having a large website, the archive of the previous events is still there, artists still have a presence and people still find the website in the SERPs, navigate to the homepage which is the current event.

[cos2030]

Cheers mate, much appreciated!

Could you kindly outline why it may be a bit more beneficial from a search perspective to use a directory? Just interested...

Cheers

[RickyShockley]

From a search perspective, It may be a bit more beneficial to use the directory route but that is often difficult to organize when we are talking about multiple pages (ie a previous years entire website).

In my opinion, the subdomain route seems like the best option. It will allow for the previous pages and content to contribute to the current sites domain authority while also serving as an extremely organized presentation of the previous years events and attractions!