What’s this about?
It’s always nice to be right. Although it doesn’t happen that often!
There have always been lots of discussions around how to deal with recurring events.
Plenty of sites just ditch old content, creating new pages for each new version. This is wrong.
Read about how to deal with recurring events properly here in this extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates w/e 01 September 2017.
#SEO #SEONews #ContentStrategy #InformationArchitecture
Google: Dealing With Recurring Events
Summary:
- Ever since QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) came out, SEOs have been all of a tizz how to deal with recurring dated content.
- Think of things like the Olympics – do you create a page for each event and promote that, or a single page and then archive off the dated content.
- John Mu confirmed the advice I’ve been giving clients for years.
Actions to take:
- If you have recurring dated content, create a single page for that content, eg an Olympics homepage.
- Update that page with the current information.
- When the information is no longer current, archive it off onto a dated page, eg Olympics 2016, 2012, 2008, etc.
- You can also create a pre-archive for future-dated events.
- Simples, eh?
- So, stop creating individual pages per event and expecting them to rank for the generic query!
- Click here to contact me to discuss how to rank and archive date-based event content.
Discussion:
I’ve seen all sorts of advice in regard to this date-based content, when the reality is pretty simple.
Creating a dedicated “event” page allows for all equity and value to flow to that URL. It will be crawled more often, it will rank for generic un-dated searches and it will make milk and honey flow (okay, maybe not the last bit).
Archiving the content, once the event is not longer current into date-based archives allows users to search using historic queries which are more likely to surface the correct URL in Google’s index.
It’s not rocket surgery, people.
More info:
The State of SEO Mid-2017 Released
TL;DR
- To deal properly with recurring events.
- Create a holding page which can accrue all value.
- Create individual event pages.
- Make sure the holding page has the most current event information on it.
- Archive the dated content. Or pre-archive for future events.
- Tha’s how you deal properly with recurring events.
- Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
- Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
- Finally, get your content ranking well on Google by starting to understand Find Crawl Index.
Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.
