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 »

Ask Yoast series