Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Archiving a festival website - subdomain or directory?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Archiving a festival website - subdomain or directory?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    4
    1041
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • cos2030
      cos2030 last edited by

      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!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Robin_Jennings
        Robin_Jennings Subscriber last edited by

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • cos2030
          cos2030 @RickyShockley last edited by

          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

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • RickyShockley
            RickyShockley last edited by

            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!

            cos2030 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • seoninj

              How to Target Country Specific Website Traffic?

              I have a website with .com domain but I need to generate traffic from UK? I have already set my GEO Targeting location as UK in Google Webmasters & set country location as UK in Google Analytics as well but still, i get traffic only from India. I have also set Geo-targeting code at the backend of the website. But nothing seems works. Can anyone help me how can is do this? I am unable to understand what else can be done.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoninj
              0
            • nchlondon

              Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?

              Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon
              0
            • chiplab

              Subdomain replaced domain in Google SERP

              Good morning, This is my first post.  I found many Q&As here that mostly answer my question, but just to be sure we do this right I'm hoping the community can take a peak at my thinking below: Problem: We are relevant rank #1 for "custom poker chips" for example. We have this development website on a subdomain (http://dev.chiplab.com).  On Saturday our live 'chiplab.com' main domain was replaced by 'dev.chiplab.com' in the SERP. Expected Cause: We did not add NOFOLLOW to the header tag. We also did not DISALLOW the subdomain in the robots.txt. We could have also put the 'dev.chiplab.com' subdomain behind a password wall. Solution: Add NOFOLLOW header, update robots.txt on subdomain and disallow crawl/index. Question: If we remove the subdomain from Google using WMT, will this drop us completely from the SERP? In other words, we would ideally like our root chiplab.com domain to replace  the subdomain to get us back to where we were before Saturday.  If the removal tool in WMT just removes the link completely, then is the only solution to wait until the site is recrawled and reindexed and hope the root chiplab.com domain ranks in place of the subdomain again? Thank you for your time, Chase

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chiplab
              0
            • MarshallThompson

              Would it be better to Start Over vs doing a Website Migration?

              Hey guys /gals I have a question please.  I have a computer repair business that does extremely well in search and is on the front page of google for anything computer repair related. However, I am currently re-branding my company and have completely redesigned every aspect of the UI and the SEO Site structure as well as the fact that I have completely written vastly different content and different title tag lines and meta descriptions for each page. So basically when doing a migration we know that we want to keep our content, titles, headlines and meta descriptions the same as to not lose our page rank. Seeing that I have completely went against the grain in all directions on a much needed company re-branding and everything is completely different from the old site is it even worthwhile 301 redirecting my old urls to the new ones that would (best) correspond with the new? In the plainest English, would I do better at Ranking the New Website QUICKER without doing 301 redirects from the OLD to the NEW? In an EXTREME instance like what I have done, would the Domain Migration IMPEDED me ranking the new site seeing how nothing is the same? I have build a Rock solid SILO Site Architecture on the New site which is WordPress using the Thesis Framework and the old domain is built on JOOMLA 1.5 Thank fellas Marshall

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarshallThompson
              0
            • sbrault74

              Moving Content To Another Website With No Redirect?

              I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today. I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care. My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again. Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault74
              1
            • vmotuz

              Follow or nofollow to subdomain

              Hi, I run a hotel booking site and the booking engine is setup on a subdomain.
               The subdomain is disabled from being indexed in robots.txt Should the links from the main domain have a nofollow to the subdomain? What are you thoughts? Thanks!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vmotuz
              0
            • djlaidler

              How do I list the subdomains of a domain?

              Hi Mozers, I am trying to find what subdomains are currently active on a particular domain. Is there a way to get a list of this information? The only way I could think of doing it is to run a google search on; site:example.com -site:www.example.com The only issues with this approach is that a majority of the indexed pages exist on the non-www domain and I still have thousands of pages in the results (mainly from the non-www). Is there another way to do it in Google? OR is there a server admin online tool that will tell me this information? Cheers, Dan

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlaidler
              0
            • Webrevolve

              Franchise sites on subdomains

              I've been asked by a client to optimise a a webpage for a location i.e. London. Turns out that the location is actually a franchise of the main company. When the company launch a new franchise, so far they have simply added a new page to the main site, for example: mysite.co.uk/sub-folder/london They have so far done this for 10 or so franchises and task someone with optimising that page for their main keyword + location. I think I know the answer to this, but would like to get a back up / additional info on it in terms of ranking / seo benefits. I am going to suggest the idea of using a subdomain for each location, example: london.mysite.co.uk Would this be the correct approach. If you think yes, why? Many thanks,

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.