Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I have a few sites that are used exclusively to promote live events (ex. tradeshows, conference, etc). In most cases these sites content fewer than 100 pages and include information for the upcoming event with links to register. Some time after the event has ended, we would redesign the site and start promoting next years event...essentially starting over with a new site (same domain).

We understand the value that many of these past event pages have for users who are looking for info from the past event and we're looking for advice on how best to archive this content to preserve for SEO.

We tend to use concise urls for pages on these sites. Ex. www.event.com/agenda or www.event.com/speakers. What are your thoughts on archiving the content from these pages so we can reuse the url with content for the new event? My first thought is to put these pages into an archive, like www.event.com/2015/speakers. Is there a better way to do this to preserve the SEO value of this content?

Awesome! Thanks so much

Erica, the dropbox link to your does not appear to be working. Could you share that again? I have a similar training need at my company. I think the SEO guide you guys have put together is great.

Our site hosts b2b content and while I agree with your scenario in general, we do have some niche content that some users would have no interest in.

A better example instead of a toy industry site might be a construction industry site. Let's say our content is generally related to the construction industry and our readers work in or own construction businesses. We might have brands and individual publications that cover everything from concrete innovations to lumber pricing to interior design. While all of the content is generally is related to construction, most interior design professionals may have zero interest in lumber pricing.

That's essentially where we're at. For branding purposes the interior design folks think it would be better to have their own uniquely branded website, but they'll obviously feel the pain of the break from the main construction site.

I agree with you and I'm hoping that I can talk them out of it. Hearing words like "enormous traffic loss" is enough for me to fight this.

We have a website and domain -- which is well-established (since 1998) -- that we are considering breaking apart for business reasons. This is a content site that hosts articles from a few of our brands in portal fashion. These brands are represented in print with their own magazines so it's important to keep their presence separate.

All of the content on the site is related to a general industry, with each brand covering a unique segment in the industry. For example, think of a toy industry site that hosts content from it's brands covering stuffed animals, electronics and board games.

The current thinking is to break out the content from a couple brands to their own sites and domains. The business case for this branding purposes. I'm of the opinion that this is a bad idea as we would likely see a noticeable decline in search traffic across the board, which we rely on for impressions for our advertisers.

If we take the appropriate steps to carefully redirect pages to the new domains what kind of hit should we expect to take from this transition? Would it make much difference if we were transition from 1 to 2 sites vs 1 to 4? Should this move be avoided all together? Any advise would be appreciated.

Thanks Ryan. If the combined page was not gated, would it make much difference to have them together as apposed to separate for SEO?

We have an engineering website (chemengonline.com) that publishes regularly, including content from our print magazine. In the magazine we have a section called "Chementators" where we highlight new innovations in chemical engineering. These are typically briefs and are often unique from one another. Last year we would group these briefs on a page like this http://www.chemengonline.com/november-chementator-briefs-5/.

We recently relaunched our website and in the process decided to break the briefs apart into their own articles like this http://www.chemengonline.com/metal-free-atrp/. Considering the short length of the briefs but technical nature of the content, would you advise keeping them separate or going back to the old way of grouping them together on the same page? And if we group them, could you offer some advice on page title...

Ex. "Chementators for February 2015" vs "Chementators - Graphene, Clean Power, Large Scale CCS, Nanoparticles, etc"

Thanks! We have a grace period of time of roughly 120 days before the new domain owners can switch the DNS on the domain, so it sounds like we should jump on the 301s immediately.

We recently sold our established domain -- for a compelling price -- and now have the task of transitioning to our new domain. What steps would you recommend to lesson the anticipated decline from search engines in this scenario?