What is the best way to handle annual events on a website?
-
Every year our company has a user conference with between 300 - 400 attendees. I've just begun giving the event more of a presence on our website. I'm wondering, what is the best way to handle highlights from previous years? Would it be to create an archive (e.g. www.companyname.com/eventname/2015) while constantly updating the main landing page to promote the current event? We also use an event website (cvent) to handle our registrations. So once we have an agenda for the current years event I do a temporary redirect from the main landing page to the registration website. I don't really like this practice and I feel like it might be better to keep all of the info on the main domain. Wondering if anybody has any opinions or feedback on that process as well.
Just looking for best practices or what others have done and have had success with.
-
Thank you Paul,
This is exactly what I needed. I've been trying to push us in this direction but it's sometimes hard to break old habits. We might even be able to save a bit of money going this route.
Thank again for the input!
-Brandon
-
Yup, there are many ways to do it, but it's vastly superior (I'd say critical) in terms of ongoing ranking and traffic generation to keep the primary content on a consistent URL the main domain. It's also vastly better for user experience as well.
Ad EGOL recommends, definitely keep the URL on your own site consistent from year to year. Create the archives of each year's highlights as children of the primary page, and make sure you are linking to the current year's page from each of the year-archive pages. This give Search Engines a clear understanding of the relative hierarchy and currency of the pages.
Do NOT 302 this page to the registration page. Simply add a call-to-action on the primary page to the registration page. You must have lots of good conference-related content on the primary page, not just a thin paragraph and a link to the reg page. You'll then want - if at all possible - to have the reg page (especially after successful registration) to redirect the visitor back to the primary page to give the followup info after registration.
Ideally, you'll want to be able to insert your Analytics tracking code on the reg site as well, and then configure cross-domain tracking for it. That way you can easily track conversions. At the very least, if you can't set up your own Analytics on the reg page, add a referral exclusion for it so the visitor coming back from the reg page doesn't show as a new visit on the primary page. You can then add conversion tracking to that return page.
These recommendations come from a background managing sites running up to 425 events per year, often with ticketing handled on a third-party site.
Hope that all makes sense?
Paul
-
So it sounds like you create an archive for the previous years event? Moving the previous years highlights to another page so it can still be accessed?
The url on our registration site changes but we redirect the main landing page to that url temporary. I think ideally the content for the event should be on the main domain and just utilize the third part event site to manage the registrations.
Seems like there are so many ways to do this.
-
We have a website with a page that links to events in our industry.
Most of the events have a single homepage that is updated every year. These homepages have a description of the upcoming event and links to agendas, registration, lodging, sponsors, speakers, exhibitors, past year highlights, etc. If you do this your search engine visibility will develop over time because almost everyone that links to your event will link to this single page year after year, for all of their websites, and every time they mention the event over time. Also, repeat visitors will be familiar and getting information, registering and finding lodging is "just like they did last year".
However, other events change the URL and everything else every year. This is a really bad idea because employees at businesses like mine, who link to events, will be snarling when they see that you have changed the URL again and must go on a treasure hunt to find it. Potential attendees will have trouble finding your event too. We have stopped linking to some of these events because finding the new pages, updating the links, and editing information is too demanding of employee time. We have not deleted a lot of events. Just the ones that are pain in the butt. When they get in touch with us to complain we tell them, let us know when you are done playing musical URLs.
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
-
Homepage Gateway for Website Divisions (Residential / Commercial) Bad for SEO?
When a website offers multiple divisions for products and services would it be a good SEO practice to implement something as Culligan does by having their homepage be a sort of gateway to the different divisions of site (home, office, commercial, industrial)? 2DaYz
Web Design | | m-johnson0 -
Can we link back from help documents to product or features pages on website?
Hi, We have all our help documents on subdirectory linked for all the features or products we provide. Like we linked website.com/help/seo-guide from website.com/services/seo-product as that is relevant guide. Do we need to link back from all help guide pages to product pages? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Any second opinions as to why our organic search website traffic hasn't recovered from website rebrand (domain change, website redesign)?
I am hoping to see if anyone in the Moz community would be able to help troubleshoot or lend any advice on a major organic search traffic issue we've been experiencing over the last 8 months. In a nutshell, we decided our ~4.5-year-old business needed to undergo a rebrand in October 2015. After changing domains & redesigning our website (more below), our search-driven sessions have dropped 20% in 2016 v.s. 2015. We made quite a few on-site modifications (with some success) post-redesign but are still deep in a rut and not sure what more we can do to recover. I've listed my theories below as to why we're still suffering this hit. If anyone could weigh in on these and/or share any other troubleshooting ideas, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it (and owe you a lunch/beverage of your choice the next time I'm in your city!). ****Backlinks - despite our efforts to 301 all links, I sense we have lost many backlinks. According to Open Site Explorer, our old domain has 1,172 backlinks (some from some very authoritative pages domains), 1,068 of which are passing link equity. In contrast, our new domain has 367 backlinks, 321 are passing link equity, and very few overlap with our old domain. Domain Age - we may have lost much of our reputation with Google as our new domain is much younger than our old domain (1-year-old v.s. 5.5 years old). Domain Name - although I thought to have common keywords in one's domain was a myth, I am now questioning that belief. Our old domain contained a popular, topical keyword and our new domain is derived from a term that is topical, but very uncommon. New URLs - our developer has insisted all links were moved to the new domain, but I have a hunch they were not. When conducting a "site search" (i.e. "site:websitename.com"), the new domain returns 7,740 results. Prior to our switch, a site search with the old domain yielded 30,000+ results. 404s - we found and fixed 100-200 404'd links after the domain switch. We still see a few pop-up today and I'm wondering if this is a red flag in Google's eyes. For a little more background too, here are the nitty gritty details with a rough timeline: Pre-October 12, 2015 - registered new domain and designed the new website on Wordpress, while researching a range of articles and resources for a successful site migration (e.g. this and this Moz guide). October 12, 2015 - flipped the switch on the website design, domain, minor content reorganization, and social handles. We announced the change to our audience via an article, newsletter, and social; informed Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) of the new address, 301'd all links from the old to the new domain, and submitted new sitemap in GWT. October 12 - 16, 2015 - traffic is normal, everything seems to be okay. October 17, 2015 - search traffic drops by 54% v.s. the same day of week pre-rebrand. October 26, 2015 - search traffic rises, so now only down by 30% v.s. the same day of week pre-rebrand. November/December 2015 - re-added numerous elements from the old website such as category, tag, and page pagination and a few sidebar modules that linked to other important pages and tags. Search traffic rises slightly in November (down 27% year-on-year), dips again in December (down 31% year-on-year). January 2016 - today (June 17, 2016) - we published more content on a daily basis and search traffic fluctuates around the 20% versus the same period in 2015. January 2016 - down 23% year-on-year February 2016 - down 17% year-on-year March 2016 - down 20% year-on-year April 2016 - down 21% year-on-year May 2016 - down 21% year-on-year June 2016 (until the 17th) - down 23% year-on-year Thank you all in advance for your time and help, please let me know if you have any questions!
Web Design | | nick490 -
Parallax websites - good for SEO?
A client of mine is redesigning their site using a vertical Parallax & upon doing some research I've stumbled across Drew Barrymore's site: http://flowerbeauty.com/ - which also uses Parallax. What I like in particular is that the site changes URLs as you scroll down. If you go direct to one of those URLs you'll notice unique meta data (albeit poorly optimised). All pages are indexed fine in Google (https://www.google.com/#bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=f8873f78dfbb8c5e&q=site:flowerbeauty.com) I'm just wondering if this is considered ok as the user experience is good and they're not doing anything manipulative, however, there's duplicate content and a potential case of cloaking at hand. I think this approach may be ok for my client for a product features page or a global office locations page since I can break up the sections nicely and split a really long page featuring a lot of content into separate URLs. Whereas Flower Beauty have done it across the whole site... i.e. one page of HTML = the whole site. What do you guys think?
Web Design | | wojkwasi0 -
How do I move a 200+ website properly with 301 redirect?
I tried to search for the answer but didnt find any direct answers. I need to move a 200+ site to a wordpress site. How am I suppose to 301 redirect all of them? Do I need to create the new pages first then have webmaster use ssh and 301 the entire list? Can anyone link me to a 1,2,3 step instructions for a huge website move? Im sure there are other issues that I need to know about.
Web Design | | bryonstout0 -
Website Design Structure
When having a website designed, is it best to have a Responsive Design with Media Queries or is it best to have a Website designed for laptops andDesktops and a second mobil website? What are the SEO benefits of each strategy and Which is best for the user experience?
Web Design | | bronxpad1 -
Best method to stop crawler access to extra Nav Menu
Our shop site has a 3 tier drop down mega-menu so it's easy to find your way to anything from anywhere. It contains about 150 links and probably 300 words of text. We also have a more context-driven single layer of sub-category navigation as well as breadcrumbs on our category pages. You can get to every product and category page without using the drop down mega-menu. Although the mega-menu is a helpful tool for customers, it means that every single page in our shop has an extra 150 links on it that go to stuff that isn't necessarily related or relevant to the page content. This means that when viewed from the context of a crawler, rather than a nice tree like crawling structure, we've got more of an unstructured mesh where everything is linked to everything else. I'd like to hide the mega-menu links from being picked up by a crawler, but what's the best way to do this? I can add a nofollow to all mega-menu links, but are the links still registered as page content even if they're not followed? It's a lot of text if nothing else. Another possibility we're considering is to set the mega-menu to only populate with links when it's main button is hovered over. So it's not part of the initial page load content at all. Or we could use a crude yet effective system we have used for some other menus we have of base encoding the content inline so it's not readable by a spider. What would you do and why? Thanks, James
Web Design | | DWJames0 -
Meta author. Is it relevant for website design company in its seo?
We don't usually add the meta author in the websites that we develop. I wonder if it would have any positive effect in our seo. We usually add a link in the footer like this "Diseño Web Vigo "(Website Development in Vigo). I am worry about this links. I'm not sure if they are positive because they are in the footer and so the link appears in all of the pages. Besides all these websites we develop are hosted in two different servers, and google could easily think that it is manipulative thing. What do you think? Thanks!!! 🙂
Web Design | | teconsite.com0