Updating content on URL or new URL

[RuudHeijnen]

High Mozzers,

We are an event organisation. Every year we produce like 350 events. All the events are on our website.

A lot of these events are held every year. So i have an URL like

www.domainname.nl/eventname

So what would you do. This URL has some inbound links, some social mentions and so on. SO if the event will be held again in 2013. Would it be better to update the content on this URL or create a new one.

I would keep this URL and update it because of the linkvalue and it is allready indexed and ranking for the desired keyword for that event.

Cheers,

Ruud

[RuudHeijnen]

no we use hyphens. Just for the example. And thanks for your answer. I think 3.1 would be an good idea.

I thought just replacing the content would be good because then you refresh your content. You do not lose your link love and the event content would be very similar. We do not really want to rank for the old content. We want a visitor to come to the event page and register for the event.

Have to think about it a little while

[StalkerB]

While I'm here, do you not have hyphens as word separators in your URLs or is it just for these examples that you're not putting them in?

i.e. Why have you gone for www.domainname.nl/eventname2013 vs www.domainname.nl/event-name-2013?

[StalkerB]

Tough one these annual events, few paths you may want to consider.

**1) Create a new url - www.domainname.nl/event-name-2013 **

Reasonable idea if the event is searched by year i.e. they'll search "event name 2013". As you probably can't be sure about what people are going to do I'd suggest not relying on that and keeping the original URL. Make sure and link to all future years from here though (link to 2013, 2014 when it comes, etc.)

PROS - You'll now have a naming convention and never have to worry about this problem again You don't need to worry about what to do with last year's info You build up your site's relevancy for the term with multiple pages on the same topic

CONS - You lose any authority and link equity the main page has built up If the pages are highly similar you may have trouble ranking the newer ones (or older ones, I dunno how Google works it out)

2) Replace it - Simply put up the new content for 2013 and overwrite the 2012 content.

Not great for a number of reasons. Significantly changing the content may lose some of your relevancy and the archived content may still have value to users.

PROS - You get to keep the same URL and it will always be the most recent information (if you update it) You get to keep your authority and link equity (caveat: If the content changes entirely search engines may strongly devalue previous links to that page)

CONS - You lose content You may lose relevancy

3) You update the content with 2013's schedule and place the older content on a new page - http://www.domainname.nl/event-name-2012

This way you can keep working on the existing URL but don't lose the old content.

PROS - You build up your site's relevancy for the term with multiple pages on the same topic

CONS - You may confuse search engines by moving the content they expected to another page

3.1) Canonicalise the 2012 content

As above but you add a canonical tag to the 'archived' page telling search engines that the main page is the one they're looking for

PROS - Users still have access to the older content

CONS - The old content no longer counts for much

4) You add the new content to the main page and keep 2012's underneath

You could simply update the page with a

<header>

combo in HTML5 or demote the previous year's to

s and use

for this year. You can even somewhat hide the 2012 stuff by using css, jquery or js (maybe ajax, I dunno), that would mean that the page can still pretty much look like you want.

PROS - Adding more relevant content to a page can improve the pages quality All content accessible from one location for the user

CONS - If it is year specific you may dilute the relevancy Shouldn't be seen as hiding content, but if there's a lot of keyword heavy text in the hidden divs it may trigger sore sort of alert

What would I do? Depends on the event/type of site I guess. Most likely 3.1 or 4 but as I'm not 100% happy with what canonicalisation does, probably 4.

If anybody wants to jump in with other ideas or other pros and cons there's probably a lot I've not thought about.

</header>

[Devanur-Rafi]

No problem my friend and thanks for the explanation. If you are going to repeat the event then there is no point in creating a new page for it. You can just add the new event to the same page mentioned under a different year. So the point is, the URL should not change but the page gets updated with the new event's info. This is very good from SEO standpoint also as the page will be constantly updated with new content and you will still enjoy all the link love that it accumulated over a period of time.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

[RuudHeijnen]

Hi Rafi, that is correct what you are saying. But every event has its own page. The question is, if we repeat this event. What would you do. Create a new event page or update the old event page of that event.

Like we would have www.domainname.nl/searchlove (wish we had that event)

And we are going to repeat searchlove in 2013. Would you put all the new data of searchlove 2013 on www.domainname.nl/searchlove or would you create a new url www.domainame.nl/searchlove2013

Sorry if the question was or is a bit difficult to understand (it mainly because of my English)

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Ruud,

Straight into the meat. If you start adding all the events to the same page, then it would dilute the page's ranking capability as it would have to rank for multiple events (event names) and this is not recommended. So, the best thing for you to do would be, come up with individual even pages and let them rank for the specific event name. Doing this, you will not only be ranking well with even specific pages but also, the size of the website will also grow which is very good for your website going forward as the search engines like big websites with lot of unique content and there are better chances for big sites to become authoritative in the niche when compared to their smaller peers. Hope you got the point.

Good luck.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi.