Keep or delete and redirect event pages?
If you write a lot about events on your site, odds are that the content on your site changes rapidly. Whether it’s food events, concerts, antique fairs, you name it, it’s a lot of work to maintain a site that lists all the fun events in a certain category and area. With new events being added regularly, and past events becoming less important, you should definitely give your site structure some extra thought.
For example: what do you do with past events? You don’t want a load of irrelevant pages bloating your site’s structure, but some of these pages might still attract visitors to your site. And how do you properly delete these pages from your site? Let’s go into expired event pages and SEO in this week’s Ask Yoast!
Carsten Lentfer emailed us quite a complicated dilemma on the subject, which I distilled to this main question:
My website is a calendar for food events. If I delete and redirect event pages once an event has passed, I will end up with loads of redirects, mainly to the homepage versus a relatively small number of ‘live’ pages. How does that affect my SEO? Is it better to keep the old pages?
Watch the video or read the transcript for the answer!
Keep event pages or delete and redirect them?
“Well, if that event is a yearly thing, then it’s definitely better to keep the event page around and just update it for the next year. If that event is a one time only thing, then I would delete it or keep it around, if there’s a lot of content on it that people might want to look at later.
It depends a bit on how thin these pages are. If they are very thin, I would delete them. If they’re rich then I would just keep them around and keep them as a sort of history.
But for the yearly events, it’s a very good idea to actually have a page that returns every year because then you’ll start ranking for each of those events better and better as time goes by. Good luck.”
Read more: 6 questions about redirects for SEO »
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Great content! I’m using it in order to improve driving traffic to my site which is a rental and bike tours page, do you think it will work?
I recently published a couple of articles; one on Gutenberg, one on Elementor Page Builder.
I’m aware these will soon be no longer topical, especially the Gut one, once it becomes standard.
Should I delete them when they’re no longer newsworthy or just leave them?
Am using sEO but not premium but i actually do like to do so, my site lost a lot of traffic for more than 8 months now and i barely make a cent and then i only get 3 organic searches please can you help me analyze my site and tell me what to do.
talking about redirect, how can i do that
I read something like deleting an old post helps the new one get indexed. is this true
What about posts about yearly events? We have a main page that describes the event, updated yearly. But we also have posts that describe what to expect at that year’s event. These are normally shared through monthly newsletters. I probably wouldn’t delete any for the last 3 years but what about ones older than 2013?
For a yearly event, is there any benefit to updating the url to have the year in it each year? “/event-name-2018/”
Would this help for people searching for: Event Name 2018
or do you lose url equity by doing this?
Thanks!
Hi Erik, it’s best to keep the URL without the year in it and just update the existing page for the new event. That way you won’t lose the rankings of the past years.
But if you do decide to delete them, should you redirect them? And if so, where?
Hi Michael, I’d say that redirecting is the best way to go: you don’t want your visitors to get a ‘content not found’ kind of message. If you have an event that’s similar to the past event you deleted, you could redirect the page there, or to your homepage or event calendar page, that’s up to you!
I always keep the old event page, even if that event is a yearly thing or a one time only thing. Just do update the page and let people know that event is closed and there’re some more newer event for them.
Sounds like a good strategy, keep up the good work! :-)
Hello there!
Please could you tell me what the size of the image used as Company logo in Knowledge Graph should be?
I mean Search Appearance -> General -> Knowledge Graph section in Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
I have not found the exact answer in the article https://yoast.com/google-knowledge-graph/ And comments are closed.
Thank you!
Hi. You can find Google’s image requirements for the Knowledge Graph here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/logo
Great topic, guys. But that doesn’t answer whether I should use redirects and/or internal links to the latest event page. Also, if I have both an editorial page for events and an event calendar should I only index the editorial page? And is there a way of seeing how many words a post has without having to go into individual posts, so that I can easily delete ‘thin’ event pages? Thanks.
I couldn’t tell you how many of my clients delete their Chrismas page, then two weeks before Christmas put it live right go SEO it! Some really good advice on this article. I will be subscribing.
Thanks, Lorraine! And that’s a good example of a recurring page to keep. After all, if your visitors want to check out that page and feel the Christmas spirit in April, why not, right? :-)
Really useful article. Thank you Joost de Valk. :)
Very informative and useful. I was looking for this solution for my food blog events. Now it makes sense. Thank you .
You’re welcome, Kawsar, that’s great to hear!