(Entry was posted by Neil Cheesma on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/04/2019).

What to do with the expired events pages?

Scenario: About 1000 events/shows across 20+ venues each year - each event lasts a few days or a week or two.The question is - what to do with the `expired` events... two of the leading websites in this market seem to leave the
expired events with the same pages/urls etc A benefit from this will no doubt be to `capture` some diminishing traffic trail... but... content that won`t satisfy the users although while on-site they might go elsewhere on the site... The alternative is to delete these urls and let them go to an `optised` (with content) 404 page Suggestions? Pros/Cons?

This question begins at 00:24:01 into the clip. Did this video clip play correctly? Watch this question on YouTube commencing at 00:24:01

Share on Twitter

Share on Facebook

YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Scott Clark: Could you convert the event pages to "event recap" pages? Then have a "similar events coming up" section on it? Give someone a free ticket to write up the event for this page?
Jeremy L. Knauff: ^ Thatâ€™s your answer.
Neil Cheesman: Each event has a related events section on the page - which is a soon to be occurring event (updated) - and "free ticket for a write-up" - you need proper reviewers for that... London-based we have over 50 reviewers - I am thinking about `recruiting` fo the regional theatres.
Scott Clark: Neil Cheesman It sounds like you have your own answer to this, just bake in a workflow to morph the pages from "coming up" to "recap/review"
Neil Cheesman: the downside is the increase use on the server... although I think each url is minimal... in terms of Kb
Michael Martinez: Neil Cheesman Unless you have a very poor server you don`t need to worry about the potential load. Since there are so few venues to manage, you could try a hybrid scheme similar to John Bosworth`s method. For each venue create a "past events" page and redirect retired event URLs to that page. The past events page will preserve any PageRank-like value that the old event URLs may have accrued. The last thing you want to do is create a lot of 404 errors because people following those old links won`t be very satisfied with a "page not found" message.
John Bosworth: I work on a lot of job board sites and we tackled the â€˜expired or no longer thereâ€™ situation by checking the url parameter on the 404 page and doing a server redirect to a custom page explaining the job was expired and these weâ€™re the next best alternatives.

More importantly, we returned a 410 status on this page so the old jobs were removed from seerch engines after so long so the site wasnâ€™t smashed with huge 404 errors.
Stockbridge Truslow: My solution is tied into your "related events" thing you mentioned in a comment above... you can leave the old events and then drive the people who land on that forward by giving them an option to find something they`re interested in that`s coming up.

The trick is to make sure you capture "what" it was they were looking for when that past event came up. Were they looking for shows at a specific "Venue"? (Click here to see upcoming shows at this venue). Were they looking for a specific "Act/Talent"? (Click here to see where is playing in the future.) Were they looking for a specific "type/genre of show"? (Click here to see more musicals, comedies, etc. based upon the category of the event they are looking at). Etc.

As long as you`re driving the user forward - I think there`s benefit to those older events. If they are marked up properly, Google will devalue them as time goes by anyway - but it won`t remove them completely so they could very well come up again in the future (especially with long-tail searches).
Neil Cheesman: Thanks for your detailed feedback - this is the way forward :)