What is the best way to deal with pages whose content changes?
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My site features businesses that offers activities for kids. Each business has its own page on my site. Business pages contains a listing of different activities that organization is putting on (such as events, summer camps, drop-in activities). Some businesses only offer seasonal activities (for example, during Christmas break and summer camps). The rest of the year, the business has no activities -- the page is empty.
This is creating 2 problems. It's poor user experience (which I can fix no problem) but it also is thin content and sometimes treated as duplicate content.
What's the best way to deal with pages whose content can be quite extensive at certain points of the year and shallow or empty at other parts? Should I include a meta ROBOTS tag to not index when there is no content, and change the tag to index when there is content? Should I just ignore this problem? Should I remove the page completely and do a redirect?
Would love to know people's thoughts.
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Excellent. That's what we'll probably end up doing. Egol and Alex, thanks for the responses.
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You could have something about the success of past events? Maybe you could encourage the businesses to write something themselves as good promotion.
How about some permanent text about the business and/or events they run on the page? If there are no events - perhaps a brief explanation that there are none yet, along with some suggestions of other local businesses running events and/or a call-to-action to sign up for notifications?
I wouldn't noindex the page when there is no content.
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Hey thanks for the reply. I should clarify that the listing page is just that -- a listing of upcoming events. A separate page features information about the business. The listings are database driven. Here is an example...
http://www.chatterblock.com/facility/13/juan-de-fuca-recreation-centre-victoria-bc/events/
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If you write the content for these pages, get busy writing more.
If the featured businesses write the content you will need to find carrots, sticks or pink slips.
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