How should I treat these Destination Wedding Pages?

[cathibanks]

Happy Friday and St. Patrick's Day Eve, Moz Community!

As I got on here to ask this question, I saw my previous questions and remembered how awesome this community is.  I also can't wait until Mozcon, but I digress.

Anyway.  We are a travel agency.  One of my websites is to support the Destination Wedding part of our business.  Each of the weddings gets their own page where we list information about the event as well as a guest list of who all has booked to attend the wedding.  After the wedding, the page is automatically unpublished.  This leads to a TON of 404s on all of the past wedding pages.  Also, even the current pages I don't feel add a lot of SEO value to the site.

So.  What is the wisdom on how I should handle these pages.  I'm assuming I should no index them?  Also, does anyone have a compelling reason I should keep the pages active for some reason?  Just move them to a different section or something? (I'm really thinking not on this...but I'm open to discussion.)

Thank you times one million in advance.

[Jennifer2112]

Happy Friday and St. Patrick's Day Eve!

For handling past wedding pages on your travel agency website:

Noindex: Yes, it's a good practice to noindex the past wedding pages to prevent them from being crawled and indexed by search engines. This helps avoid unnecessary 404 errors and ensures your site focuses on current and relevant content.

Redirect: If there's a specific reason to retain the URLs or if you have relevant content to redirect users to, consider setting up 301 redirects from the past wedding pages to a relevant section or a consolidated page for archived events.

Archive Section: You could create an archive section for past weddings, keeping them accessible for those interested but not directly impacting your main SEO efforts. This way, users can find them if needed, but they won't clutter your main navigation or search results.

Remember, the goal is to maintain a clean and user-friendly site structure while optimizing for SEO.

[Jennifer2112]

Happy Friday and St. Patrick's Day Eve!

For handling past wedding pages on your travel agency website:

Noindex: Yes, it's a good practice to noindex the past wedding pages to prevent them from being crawled and indexed by search engines. This helps avoid unnecessary 404 errors and ensures your site focuses on current and relevant content.

Redirect: If there's a specific reason to retain the URLs or if you have relevant content to redirect users to, consider setting up 301 redirects from the past wedding pages to a relevant section or a consolidated page for archived events.

Archive Section: You could create an archive section for past weddings, keeping them accessible for those interested but not directly impacting your main SEO efforts. This way, users can find them if needed, but they won't clutter your main navigation or search results.

Remember, the goal is to maintain a clean and user-friendly site structure while optimizing for SEO.

[EGOL]

Unpublished?   404's?

I would not delete them.  Instead, I would enhance them (with permission of the bride and groom).  Ask the bride, groom and family and attendees, the photographer, the baker, the florist, the officiant, the catering service to contribute photos, memories, and more.  If you provide good reasons, people will share these pages, link to them, revisit them, browse them and more.  Imagine links from the photographer's site, bakers, florist, etc...

As your collection for a specific destination grows you have more cred in search, more in bound links, more type-ins and direct traffic to your website.  Allow people to sign up to receive a message a few weeks after the wedding when the page has some enhancements.

Yes, this will take a lot of work but it might be worth it.  It might be an add on that you can use to earn an extra fee. You might be able to get an interface where the bride and groom or their friends can help build and take the work burden off of you.  This might be used in advance of the wedding to communicate.

Just wild ideas as I am not in this business but know how many people like to build things and share stuff.