Dealing with past events
-
Hi
We have a website which lists both upcoming and past events. Currently everything is indexed by google, with no real issues (usually it finds the most up-to-date events) and we have deprioritised the past events in the sitemap.
Do I need to go one step further and noindex events which are past or just leave it as-is? They dont really hold much value, but sometimes will have a number of incoming links and social media shares pointing to them. We want to keep the page active for visitors, just wondering about google (there's no real link between past events and future either, so difficult to 'point' to newer version of an event)
We have approx 1M 'past' events and growing so its a big change. Also would you keep them in sitemap with lower priority, or just remove them?
EDIT: Just seen a Matt Cutts post from 2014 which indicates than an 'unavailable_after' meta tag might be best?
-
Hello benseb,
You mention that you have de-prioritized past events in the sitemap. You could go the nofollow route although this is a somewhat clumsy way to go about it.
I think based on what you have described, your best bet is to leave it as is (after moving forward with the hint Matt Cutts dropped) rather than eliminating a load of content which is sending Google positive signals. My guess is that these positive signals overpower any negative signals that might be resulting from aging content.
If everything has been properly indexed and current events are showing up, I wouldn't make any big alterations - why mess with a good thing?
If you begin seeing drastic declines in traffic or user interaction, that might be the time to take a harder stance. For now though, let it be.
Best of luck!
Rob
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
-
Rankings Shifting for the Past 2-3 Years
For the past 2-3 years, my site’s organic rankings have been dramatically shifting, ranking well for a few days and then dropping for a month or two, then ranking again for a few days, and then dropping again. During the time of higher rankings, form submissions increase significantly. The ranking increases or decreases are typically between 10-30 spots each time. I’ve done everything I can think of to address any issues: improved speed, limited 404s, changed the architecture of the site, updated link anchor text, etc. Nothing seems to work. The site has 88% of its traffic coming from desktop, with 9% from mobile and 3% from tablet. The disparity between desktop and mobile leads me to believe that the ranking issues are mobile-related, especially now that Google is using mobile-first indexing. I thought dwell time could be an issue, but session duration is 2:07 minutes and bounce rate is under 60%, with an average of 2.27 pages per session. That doesn’t indicate any quality of traffic issues to me. There are no warnings in Google Search Console, and speed is 58 for mobile and 86 for desktop on Page Speed Insights. I’ve been doing SEO for 12 years, but this has me stumped. My top suspicions are: Speed issues on mobile Penalties for redirects from old website to the new website Penalties for anchor text for the old brand name instead of the new one. The site is https://dragonflydm.com Has anyone seen anything like this? Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dragonflydm0 -
Mobile site scrolls past content straight to the products. Can this affect our seo?
As our content can be quite long at the top, we introduced js anchor scroll going straight to the products, by passing the banner and the content at the top. Can this have an issue on seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits1 -
Product search URLs with parameters and pagination issues - how should I deal with them?
Hello Mozzers - I am looking at a site that deals with URLs that generate parameters (sadly unavoidable in the case of this website, with the resource they have available - none for redevelopment) - they deal with the URLs that include parameters with *robots.txt - e.g. Disallow: /red-wines/? ** Beyond that, they userel=canonical on every PAGINATED parameter page[such as https://wine****.com/red-wines/?region=rhone&minprice=10&pIndex=2] in search results.** I have never used this method on paginated "product results" pages - Surely this is the incorrect use of canonical because these parameter pages are not simply duplicates of the main /red-wines/ page? - perhaps they are using it in case the robots.txt directive isn't followed, as sometimes it isn't - to guard against the indexing of some of the parameter pages??? I note that Rand Fishkin has commented: "“a rel=canonical directive on paginated results pointing back to the top page in an attempt to flow link juice to that URL, because “you'll either misdirect the engines into thinking you have only a single page of results or convince them that your directives aren't worth following (as they find clearly unique content on those pages).” **- yet I see this time again on ecommerce sites, on paginated result - any idea why? ** Now the way I'd deal with this is: Meta robots tags on the parameter pages I don't want indexing (nofollow, noindex - this is not duplicate content so I would nofollow but perhaps I should follow?)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
Use rel="next" and rel="prev" links on paginated pages - that should be enough. Look forward to feedback and thanks in advance, Luke0 -
[Advice] Dealing with an immense URl structure full of canonicals with Budget & Time constraint
Good day to you Mozers, I have a website that sells a certain product online and, once bought, is specifically delivered to a point of sale where the client's car gets serviced. This website has a shop, products and informational pages that are duplicated by the number of physical PoS. The organizational decision was that every PoS were supposed to have their own little site that could be managed and modified. Examples are: Every PoS could have a different price on their product Some of them have services available and some may have fewer, but the content on these service page doesn't change. I get over a million URls that are, supposedly, all treated with canonical tags to their respective main page. The reason I use "supposedly" is because verifying the logic they used behind canonicals is proving to be a headache, but I know and I've seen a lot of these pages using the tag. i.e: https:mysite.com/shop/ <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop https:mysite.com/shop/productA <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop/productA The problem is that I have over a million URl that are crawled, when really I may have less than a tenth of them that have organic trafic potential. Question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles-O
For products, I know I should tell them to put the URl as close to the root as possible and dynamically change the price according to the PoS the end-user chooses. Or even redirect all shops to the main one and only use that one. I need a short term solution to test/show if it is worth investing in development and correct all these useless duplicate pages. Should I use Robots.txt and block off parts of the site I do not want Google to waste his time on? I am worried about: Indexation, Accessibility and crawl budget being wasted. Thank you in advance,1 -
Dealing with thin comment
Hi again! I've got a site where around 30% of URLs have less than 250 words of copy. It's big though, so that is roughly 5,000 pages. It's an ecommerce site and not feasible to bulk up each one. I'm wondering if noindexing them is a good idea, and then measuring if this has an effect on organic search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO1 -
Pagination and View All Pages Question. We currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to View all as I don't believe it's a good user experience so how best we deal with this.
Hello All, I have an eCommerce site and have implemented the use rel="prev" and rel="next" for Page Pagination. However, we also have a View All which shows all the products but we currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to this as I don't believe showing the user a page with shed loads of products on it is actually a good user experience so we havent done anything with this page. I have a sample url from one of our categories which may help - http://goo.gl/9LPDOZ This is obviously causing me duplication issues as well . Also , the main category pages has historically been the pages which ranks better as opposed to Page 2, Page 3 etc etc. I am wondering what I should do about the View All Page and has anyone else had this same issue and how did they deal with it. Do we just get rid of the View All even though Google says it prefers you to have it ? I also want to concentrate my link juice on the main category pages as opposed being diluted between all my paginated pages ? - Does anyone have any tips on how to best do this and have you seen any ranking improvement from this ? Any ideas greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
How Does Google Deal with Negative Reviews or Mentions
I would really like to get everyone's opinion on how you all think Google deals with negative reviews, or just mentions on negative websites. One of my clients has a page on a powerful negative website (one that is designed to shame all those on it), and no other real reviews around the web. I have never seen any evidence that Google takes positive or negative reviews into account when ranking websites. But maybe one of you has? Currently when you search for my client by name, the negative website comes up second, which is obviously embarrassing for them. If we sought out a whole load of positive (obviously genuine) reviews from happy clients, do you think this might influence the prominent placement of this negative website? Also would it influence the ranking of the website in general? I would love to hear your opinions on this topic. [BTW We have already explored the path of the right to be forgotten, but it seems to be inundated so we are not holding our breaths.]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wagada0 -
How do I best deal with pages returning 404 errors as they contain links from other sites?
I have over 750 URL's returning 404 errors. The majority of these pages have back links from sites, however the credibility of these pages from what I can see is somewhat dubious, mainly forums and sites with low DA & PA. It has been suggested placing 301 redirects from these pages, a nice easy solution, however I am concerned that we could do more harm than good to our sites credibility and link building strategy going into 2013. I don't want to redirect these pages if its going to cause a panda/penguin problem. Could I request manual removal or something of this nature? Thoughts appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0