Keep Pages with Old Dates?
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We have a tourism related site. We list annual events. Right now the URL extension includes the year. I assume it is better to keep the same page and update the dates, thereby keeping any links, ranking trust and authority we built. Is that the best strategy by updating the event info with the new dates?
I would assume with a new page for the new year we would be starting over again and would have too much similar content and link diffusion.
And in the future are we better off not including the year in the URL extension?
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Just like having a blog on your site, old blog posts are still "worth it" to keep as old blog posts. If there's enough content on a page that's related to the past event, then I would keep that event page so it remains in the index. You're adding new content to your site, and perhaps adding photos from the event or other text/copy about the event would help and be useful to users who look at it after it's happened. If you have photos, then next year you can provide a link to last year's event, and that might be useful in future promotions of the event.
If it's an event that happens around the same time every year (it's an annual event), then you might want to create a unique page or pages on the site just for that event. People search for the names of specific events in certain locations (i.e., New Orleans Mardi Gras) and you might be able to rank in the search results for that event name. In that case, I would probably not specify the year on the event page: or simply update the page every year with the latest info and the date of the event.
If this is an event calendar and there's not going to be a lot of content on the event listing, then you might actually run into duplicate content issues or potentially Google "panda-like" issues for having a lot of low quality content on the site. You may want to go ahead and remove those old event listings and only keep current, future listings on the event calendar.
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301 Redirects will pass almost all of the authority. I suggest as the other commenter stated to use a static URL.
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I guess I am trying to keep the authority and "age" of the page while just updating the dates. I assume this would be better. Maybe do a 301 redirect from the URL with the year in it and start fresh with a URL with no date in it.
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These are all individual pages.....not a single Events page. So you would would have
Event A Jan 30, 2013
Event A Jan 29, 2014.
Same event...different year.
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I think it would be best to not specify the year in the URL and just have an /upcoming-events.html type of page. That way any incoming links to it keep adding to the page authority, no matter how old they are. And the links in your own site's navigation do not need to be changed each year.
But you should update it regularly to remove the past events and add new events. Weekly would be great, monthly would probably be the longest you would want to go between updates.
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At times it could be best to just keep dates out of the URL but that is little signal to Google. You can always use structured data to signal to Google the page is new or updated.
Another thing you could do is do a 301 redirect from the old page to the new page, thus pushing all the link juice to the new URL.
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