Saving old events - Can it affect SEO?

[Carloberg]

Hi,

We are currently looking over our website to help improve SEO. We came across some old events (one year old) that we still have published. Should we always unpublish old events? Does it affect SEO to have old events published? 

Looking for some best practise! 

Thanks! 

[webdew · Accepted solution]

Hi @Carloberg 

Yes, we believe that any form of old content impacts the overall authority of your website inversely. Google continues to filter out irrelevant and redundant content. So, if you have events on your website that are no longer valid, you are more likely to get noticed for the wrong reasons. We suggest you optimize your websites for the same.
However, if they are too many or you have even pages that add value, you can restructure them as history. But in any case, remove what doesn't make sense anymore.

[Carloberg]

Perfect, thank you for the answer! 🙂 

[JonPayne · Accepted solution]

Hi @Carloberg - I have a suggestion - I wonder if @webdew agrees 🙂

Twice a year (before COVID!) my agency holds an inbound marketing event in the UK. After each event, rather than delete the out of date pages we populate the relevant event and speaker pages with the videos, slides and from their talks. As a result we get about 40% of our web traffic in months when we DON'T have an event. Each page with the "old" talks on then has a newsletter sign up CTA, which (I beleive) means we grow the mailing list far more than we would if we just deleted the old content.

A different approach 🙂

Just noticed the CTA I describe has disapeared - off to ratttle the cage of a web developer.

[webdew · Accepted solution]

Hi @Carloberg 

Yes, we believe that any form of old content impacts the overall authority of your website inversely. Google continues to filter out irrelevant and redundant content. So, if you have events on your website that are no longer valid, you are more likely to get noticed for the wrong reasons. We suggest you optimize your websites for the same.
However, if they are too many or you have even pages that add value, you can restructure them as history. But in any case, remove what doesn't make sense anymore.

[TiphaineCuisset]

Hi @Carloberg 

I want to tag some of our experts on this - @webdew @JonPayne @Daniel_Bleich any thoughts to share with @Carloberg on this? 

Thank you!

Tiphaine