With regards to SEO is it good or bad to remove all the old events from our website?
-
Our website sells tickets for various events across the UK, we do have a LOT of old event pages on our website which simply say SOLD OUT. What is the best practice?
Should these event pages be removed and a 301 redirect added to redirect to the home page?
Or should these pages remain in tact with simply SOLD OUT on the page?
-
This post may also be of help: http://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content
-
could you perhaps use these pages as a way of capturing visitors email addresses? I.e 'The above event has now sold out/ taken place but to be first to hear about the next event (by the same group/artist) submit your email address here?
I think it is good to have these pages still on your site as it shows visitors you've sold tickets for lots of past events and I suppose if the pages are well optimised it will see you rank for tickets for the particular artist on the page.
Either way I'd keep the pages.
-
Depending on how your site is set up I think some history of sold out events gives you credibility from a user perspective.
Having said that however, as a user I don't want to see sold out events past the last 6 months (if you've got quite a few) - 12 months at the most.
Anything past that I would delete and redirect to current events.
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
-
Our Journey back to Good Rankings.
17 year old support site on the topic of hair loss. The home page (and pretty much all internal pages) enjoyed Page 1 Place 1 ranking out of 64 million search results for 12 of those years, for our main search phrase: hair loss. Other internal pages ranked #1 for other search phrases. I believe we were blessed by Google because we did everything the best we could: Genuine, manually constructed, unique, relevant content that was created from the heart. Other generalized health sites linked-to our site for more information on hair loss, and we had a couple thousand back-links that we never had to pay for. For the last 7 years or so, core content and news center went stagnant, but user-driven content (discussion forums) continued chugging along. Very old CMS systems had created duplicate content (print pages, PDF pages, share pages) and the site was not mobile-friendly at all. By the end of 2013, our home page had been bumped to the middle of Page 2 for "hair loss" as Google began pushing us down. Replacing our 700 page site dedicated to the topic of hair loss with random news articles, and dermatology organization sites that had little more than a paragraph of content on the topic. Traffic and income dropped by over 75% with this change, and by 2015 we were looking at a 9 year old site design that wasn't mobile-friendly, and had no updated content outside of the Forums for about as long. Mid 2015 we began a frantic renovation. The store was converted to a mobile-friendly design, tossed into HTTPS, and our developer screwed up, forgetting to put canonicals in place. Soon after, our store rankings dropped to almost zero. By the end of 2015 this was fixed, and we were spending tens of thousands to convert a very large, very old site into WordPress with a responsive, mobile friendly, lightning fast page-load design. We had no Google Analytics data prior to this either. Actions Taken starting Jan 1, 2016 - May 2016: Static Homepage + core content > Now put into WordPress. (80 pages) - proper 301's. News section running a 10 year old "PostNuke" CMS > Now put into WordPress. (300 pages). 301's. Forums running a 5 year old vBulletin > Now put into XenForo. (160,000 pages). 301's. Profiles section running a 10 year old "SocialEngine" CMS > Now put into new SocialEngine. (10,000 pages)* Site moved from HTTP > HTTPS. Proper 301's. Store CMS already finished months prior but sales dropped by 90%. Almost zero. Old forum CMS had created countless duplicate URLs. All of these 410'd. Old forum CMS had 65,000 pointless member profile pages indexed. All 410'd. Old news CMS created 4+ dup pages for every article (print, etc). All 301'd to new Article URL. Our HTACCESS file is thousands of lines long, trying to clean everything up, and redirect everything back to one, accurate, proper URL for each piece of content. It was a lot of work! After 17 years, we obviously had spammy sites linking to us. I quickly deleted content on my site the worst offenders were linking to. Then hired an SEO person to create a disavow audit on the other 20,000 sites liking to us. He settled on around 300 URLs needing disavow, but commented that didn't see any evidence we'd been penalized by Panda. He finished Friday and we will submit disavow Monday. Ran Screaming Frog audit on the site Cleaned up Google Search Console fully Created properties and submitted new sitemaps there. Monitored each property for the last 3 months and addressed 100% of issues raised. Revived Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram Accounts. Began publishing new content in our /news/ section and cross-posting to Social Media. Began improving up our Title Tags in the Forums as they often were pointless: "Hi! Need help!?" **Despite this, nothing has helped. Nothing has budged. Our traffic hasn't moved an inch since January. Sales have dropped 90% and site income has almost dried up. ** I have taken out a $25,000 personal loan just to cover my mortgage and pay my bills while I attempt to identify what's going wrong, and how to fix it. It bought me about 3 months, and that 3 months is almost up. I hired 2 or 3 different SEO experts with varying levels of experience. Due to no Google Analytics data to draw on, none of them could come up with any specific explanations for our drop in ranking over the last 4 years. That's why I took the approach to just "do everything" to fix all problems identified, and then cross my fingers. It hasn't worked. As of today our home page is not even found in google for our main search phrase: hair loss. Its simply not there. At all. And the only thing that is ranking is our forums, ranked at "67", which is horrible. But I don't understand why a site that was doing so well for over a decade has now been completely dropped from Google, without a single notice in Console or otherwise, explaining any problems. I realize this is a massive undertaking, and an equally massive post. But any time you can spend helping me will be forever appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | HLTalk0 -
Does using parent pages in WordPress help with SEO and/or indexing for SERPs?
I have a law office and we handle four different practice areas. I used to have multiple websites (one for each practice area) with keywords in the actual domain name, but based on the recommendation of SEO "experts" a few years ago, I consolidated all the webpages into one single webpage (based on the rumors at the time that Google was going to be focusing on authorship and branding in the future, rather than keywords in URLs or titles). Needless to say, Google authorship was dropped a year or two later and "branding" never took off. Overall, having one webpage is convenient and generally makes SEO easier, but there's been a huge drawback: When my page comes up in SERPs after searching for "attorney" or "lawyer" combined with a specific practice area, the practice area landing pages don't typically come up in the SERPs, only the front page comes up. It's as if Google recognizes that I have some decent content, and Google knows that I specialize in multiple practice areas, but it directs everyone to the front page only. Prospective clients don't like this and it causes my bounce rate to be high. They like to land on a page focusing on the practice area they searched for. Two questions: (1) Would using parent pages (e.g. http://lawfirm.com/divorce/anytown-usa-attorney-lawyer/ vs. http://lawfirm.com/anytown-usa-divorce-attorney-lawyer/) be better for SEO? The research I've done up to this point appears to indicate "no." It doesn't make much difference as long as the keywords are in the domain name and/or URL. But I'd be interested to hear contrary opinions. (2) Would using parent pages (e.g. http://lawfirm.com/divorce/anytown-usa-attorney-lawyer/ vs. http://lawfirm.com/anytown-usa-divorce-attorney-lawyer/) be better for indexing in Google SERPs? For example, would it make it more likely that someone searching for "anytown usa divorce attorney" would actually end up in the divorce section of the website rather than the front page?
Algorithm Updates | | micromano0 -
Complete website redesign: original domain vs subdomain vs new domain ?
Hello dear community fellas!
Algorithm Updates | | PayPro
The story goes like this: my company has a good ol' website launched back in 2008 and since then nothing much was updated there. Our rank dropped significantly because, well, barely any SEO was done for it. Me and my team decided to redesign the whole thing: content, structure, visuals, links, everything but this time really making it right. However, with our oldie we managed to get a nice user base, so we still want to get all the traffic juice out of it. Now the questions is where do you think is the best place to publish our new website: Our original domain www.companyname.com? Create a subdomain new.companyname.com? Totally new domain www.namecompany.com? Cheers!0 -
Panda, Negative SEO and now Penguin - help needed
Hi,
Algorithm Updates | | mlm12
We are small business owners who've been running a website for 5 years that provides our income. We've done very little backlinking ourselves, and never did paid directories or anything like that - usually just occasional forum or blog responses. A few articles here and there with some of our keyword phrases for internal pages. Of course I admit we've done some kwp backlinks on some blogs, but our anchor text profile is largely brand names and our domain name and non keywords (excepting for some "bad" backlinks). Our DA is 34, PA 45 for our home page. We were doing great until last Sept 27 when we got hit by Panda and have been working on deoptimizing our site for keywords, we made a new site in Wordpress for good architecture and ease of use for our customers, and we're deleting/repurposing low quality pages and making our content more robust. We haven't yet recovered from this and now it appears we got hit May 22 for Penguin...ARGH! I recently discovered (hard to have time to devote to everything with just two of us) that others can "negative seo" a site now and I feel this has happened based upon results below... I signed up for linkdetox.com yesterday and it gives a grim picture of our backlinks (says we are in "deadly risk" territory). We have 83 "toxic" links and 600 some "suspicious" links (many are in malware/malicious listed sites, many are .pl domains from Poland, others are I believe foreign domains, or domains that are a bunch or letters that make no sense, or spammy sounding emd domains), - this makes up 80% of our links. As this is our only business, our income is now 1/3 of what it has been, even with PPC ads going as we've been hit hard by all of this and are wondering if we can survive fixing this. We do have an SEO firm minimally helping us along with guidance on recovering, but with income so low, we are doing the work ourselves and can't afford much. Needless to say, we are quite distressed and from reading around, not sure if we'll be able to recover and that is deeply saddening, especially from Negative SEO. We want to make sure we are on the right path for recovery if possible, hence my questions. We haven't been in contact with Google for reconsideration, again, no penalty messages from them. First of all, if we don't have a manual penalty, would you still contact all the toxic/malicious/possible porn looking sites and ask for a link removal, wait, ask for link removal, wait then disavow? Or just go straight to Google disavow? For backlinks coming from sites that are "gone" (like a message saying the account has been suspended), or there is no website there anymore, do I try and contact them too? Or go direct to disavow? Or do nothing? For the sites flagged as malicious (by linkdetox, my browser, or by Google), I don't want to try and open them on my browser to see if this site is legitimate. If linkdetox doesn't have the contact info for these - what are we supposed to do? For "suspicious" foreign sites that I can't read the webpage -would you still disavow them (I've seen many here say links from foreign sites should be disavowed). How do you keep up with all this is someone is negative SEOing you? We're really frustrated that Google's change has made it possible for competitors to tank your business (arguably though, if we had a stronger backlink profile this may not have hurt, or not as much - not sure). When you are small biz owners and can't hire a group to constantly monitor backlinks, get quality backlinks, content, site optimization, etc - it seems an almost impossible task to do. Are wordpress left nav and footer link anchor text an issue for Penguin? I would think Google would realize these internal links will be repetitive for the same anchor text on Wordpress (I know Matt Cutts said to not use the same anchor text more than once for internal linking -but obviously nav and footer menus will do this). What would you do if this was you? Try and fix it all? Start over with a new domain and 301 it (some say this has been working)? Just start over with a new domain and don't redirect? Thanks for your input and advice. We appreciate it.0 -
Site-wide Footer Link on Client/Friend Website - Dangerous?
Hi Guys, I've got a friend / client / business associate who's website I helped develop. It's a three letter dot-com, so good trust, and an eCommerce site, so lot's of pages. When I launched my new site about 6 weeks ago I put "Official IT Partner of MySite.com" in the footer. No keywords in the anchor text, just the domain URL... There are no other external links like that on the site whatsoever, and I haven't been hit by Penguin. I'm ranking well for local targeted keywords a few weeks after launch, and traffic continues to increase... I am worried that Google will see this is unnatural, but I've received no warning or experienced any decline in rankings. There's about 2800 pages linking from the site to my site, all in the footer of course. Would it be better to remove the link from the footer and add it just to the home page and a couple of other high authority pages, or should I leave it be. It's not "unnatural", I am affiliated with the site and work in partnership with the site, but it does fit that profile. I'm thinking about removing the footer link and adding a small graphic on the home page of the linking site which links to my root domain, with a couple of broad keyword anchored links in a description underneath that also link to relevant pages on my site... What do you think? 2800 links w/ my URL as anchor text from high Domain Authority / Low Page Authority pages (the homepage and a few other pages have decent authority) to my root domain OR Three different links from one High DA/ High PA homepage (one image alt, two anchored w/ broad keywords) to three different pages on my site. Again, there are no other site-wide external links on the domain, and I'm pretty sure I escaped the Penguin. Looking forward to hearing the different points of view. Thanks, Anthony
Algorithm Updates | | Anthony_NorthSEO2 -
301 Redirect has removed search rankings
As per instructions from a SEO , we did a 301 redirect on our url to a new url (www.domain.com to subdomain xxxx.domain.com). But the problem is we lost all the google rankings that the previous url had gained. How can we rollback this situation. Can we retrieve the rankings of the previous url if we remove 301 permenant move redirection ? The new url does not figure in the google search for the keyword that use to fetch the previous url at no 3 in the results Please help ...
Algorithm Updates | | BizSparkSEO0 -
Redirected old domain to new, how long before seeing the external links under the new domain?
Before contracting SEO services, my client decided to change his established root domain to one more customer-friendly. Since he had no expertise on board, no redirects were set up until 6 months later. I ran stats right before the old domain was redirected and have a report showing that he had roughly 750 external links from 300 root domains. We redirected the old domain to the new domain in mid Jan 2012. Those external links are still not showing in Open Site Explorer for the new domain. I've tested it a dozen times, and the old domain definitely points to the new domain. How long should it take before the new domain picks up those external links? Should I do anything else to help the process along?
Algorithm Updates | | smsinc0
