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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Site Wide Links
Howdy Moz! So our agency has been around for long enough to have a few sites we've built that have our credit in their footer resulting in a site wide link. Mostly just our name. We've heard that Google does not particularly like site wide links, should we go through and remove some of these old links?
On-Page Optimization | | wearehappymedia0 -
SEO and dynamic content
I am working on a project right now and I am looking for some advice on the SEO implications. The site is an e-commerce site and on the category pages it is using an external call to retrieve the products after the page is loaded. How it works is all content on the site is loaded, then after that a js script appends an ID and loads all of the product information. I am unsure how Google will see this, anyone have any insights?
On-Page Optimization | | LesleyPaone0 -
SEO Content Revolution Question
I was wondering if articles written about questions people are asking will help my website rank better. For example let's say I wrote an article answering the query, "What Hair Dye Does Angela Merkel Use?" or, "Is Hillary Clinton Thinking of Running for President," and they rank well on google, and in turn they get viewed a lot by searchers because it answers their queries. Would this help my website as whole start ranking better? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | OOMDODigital0 -
Site Not Ranking for Key Term
Question for my fellow Mozers I have a ranking question that I cannot put my finger on. I have a site (visitplano.com) where the client wants to rank for the keyword "Plano". I can't say if the site was previously ranking for this keyword, but I looked into the basic SEO practices and found that the keyword is incorporated in: Domain Title Content There is a lack of internal linking and anchor text within the content External links - 1,558 DA - 46 PA - 55 Currently, the website does not rank for the keyword "Plano". Could someone shed some light on why they aren't ranking or what I may be missing? I would greatly appreciate your help.
On-Page Optimization | | flcity150 -
New jobboard: Can redirecting folder (site.com/jobboard) to subdomain (jobboard.site.com) hurt SEO?
Hi there, I'm planning to implement a jobboard on my website which needs to be installed on a subdomain (jobboard.site.com) but I'd really like to use site.com/jobboard for promoting this jobboard (jobboard collects external industry jobs). Are there any possible disadvantages when I set up a 301 redirect from jobboard.site.com to site.com/jobboard? Also: What if I want to move this jobboard to a unique domain one day (e.g. jobboard-industry-xy.com), Would that be tricky (as I'd basically have to redirect the folder-to-subdomain redirect to an external domain and therefore get a folder-to-subdomain-to-external-domain redirect...)? Cheers, Thomas
On-Page Optimization | | stl990 -
Duplicate Content Issues with Forum
Hi Everyone, I just signed up last night and received the crawl stats for my site (ShapeFit.com). Since April of 2011, my site has been severely impacted by Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates and we have lost about 80% of our traffic during that time. I have been trying to follow the guidelines provided by Google to fix the issues and help recover but nothing seems to be working. The majority of my time has been invested in trying to add content to "thin" pages on the site and filing DMCA notices for copyright infringement issues. Since this work has not produced any noticeable recovery, I decided to focus my attention on removing bad backlinks and this is how I found SEOmoz. My question is about duplicate content. The crawl diagnostics showed 6,000 errors for duplicate page content and the same for duplicate page title. After reviewing the details, it looks like almost every page is from the forum (shapefit.com/forum). What's the best way to resolve these issues? Should I completely block the "forum" folder from being indexed by Google or is there something I can do within the forum software to fix this (I use phpBB)? I really appreciate any feedback that would help fix these issues so the site can hopefully start recovering from Panda/Penguin. Thank you, Kris
On-Page Optimization | | shapefit0 -
When Adding content to the site. Should I use the same keyword term on each page or select a secondary keyword to focus on?
I have created a site www.autoinsurancefremontca.com. The index page is SEO for the key term auto insurance fremont ca. I want to add more content on another page of this site. Should I have that page also SEO'd for the same keyword or should I pick another keyword to focus on?
On-Page Optimization | | Greenpeak0 -
Why does Google no longer like our site?
Hey guys, I'm trying to figure out why the traffic and rankings have been plummeting on www.readprint.com. It's a collection of both public domain books and books on Amazon's store. If anyone can offer any pointers as to if it's duplicate content or ??? It used to get 300K visits/mo but has slowly been dropping over the last year. I appreciate anyone's expertise!
On-Page Optimization | | CoBraJones0