What to do about short-life pages and search engines?

[NooseLadder]

I have pages that will be created and will only have a short life before they are deleted. They are showing upcoming events/diary dates. When the event/date has passed the page will be deleted.

I'm looking for some recommendations on how to handle these pages in PW and what to do about them possibly getting indexed by search engines and then being deleted. (404).

Not sure about using rel="noindex" or rel="nofollow". If this is the way to go can they be applied to certain pages only upon creation?

Maybe it could be handled by .htaccess to automatically apply a 301 redirect to these pages but I would not know if that is possible and how to make it happen.

This raises another question: If deleting the pages is the right thing to do (awaiting recommendations) then how can I automate page deletion by date, so that when the date of the event has passed the page is deleted?

I look forward to your comments.

[diogo]

You can use a robots.txt file to keep the search engines away from these pages. Just disallow the parent like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /parent/

I don't know enough about automated tasks in PHP to answer exactly to want you want in the second question, but I know how to go around

To delete the file after let's say a week, you can put this on those pages template:

$created = $page->created; // this returns a unix timestamp of when the page was created
$week = 7 * 24 * 60 * 60; // a week in unix time (7days * 24hours * 60min * 60sec)
$now = time();

if($now - $created > $week){
//page is older than one week, delete it and redirect
}

This will delete the page when accessed. But if the page is listed from other templates, you would have also to do all this inside a foreach on that other template.

I'm sure there is a better way, but I wanted to share anyway

[DaveP]

I recall reading (can't remember where, sadly) that the best way to deal with this in SEO terms is to leave the page published, but change the content after the event has happened - ie explain on the page that the event was in the past and include a short report on how it went.

The reasoning behind this is that a page about a popular event can generate incoming links (traditional links or social mentions) in a short time, so there's no point wasting them. You can also add a comments box on the page and ask attendees how the event went, generating a bit of UGC as well. You can also link to upcoming similar events and pass a bit of Googlejuice on.

[Joss]

Yes, DaveP has the right of it.

Apart from being courteous and helpful by replacing the content with "This content is no longer available, however, you may be interested in these related articles ..." or something along those line, you can also leverage the visitor who, after all, has landed at your site.

You should do something with them!

This is good marketing practice dating back long before the internet. When readers would write to Magazines or Publishers asking for an old article that was no longer available, the standard practice was to send them an apology and enclose a recent copy of the magazine as a consolation.

One new reader and satisfied customer. This response felt personal and direct - it felt much more than some automated reply (even if, in reality it was not far off being automated for the day).

Modern internet publishing has huge amounts to learn from the print publishing industry.

Joss

[DaveP]

Slightly going off at a tangent, but somewhat relevant to the OP - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/introducing-data-highlighter-for-event.html

[NooseLadder]

You can use a robots.txt file to keep the search engines away from these pages. Just disallow the parent like this:

Yes of course, I should have known that, DOH! Thanks for the reminder.

I recall reading (can't remember where, sadly) that the best way to deal with this in SEO terms is to leave the page published, but change the content after the event has happened - ie explain on the page that the event was in the past and include a short report on how it went.

The reasoning behind this is that a page about a popular event can generate incoming links (traditional links or social mentions) in a short time, so there's no point wasting them. You can also add a comments box on the page and ask attendees how the event went, generating a bit of UGC as well. You can also link to upcoming similar events and pass a bit of Googlejuice on.

Yes this makes sense. After all its another page that's (potentially) indexed by the search engines, so why remove that opportunity for users to find your site!

Modern internet publishing has huge amounts to learn from the print publishing industry.

Yes you are right and from traditional marketing/sales in general.

Slightly going off at a tangent, but somewhat relevant to the OP - http://googlewebmast...-for-event.html

I have used micro data markup before; I used to run an ecommerce site and I obtained customer's reviews and used the micro data markup (rich snippets) to 'highlight' the reviews so that they got indexed as reviews in Google. It works well. Data Highlighter looks interesting, I'm not sure yet, but I might stick to micro data markup as I have dabbled with it before.