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Follow @DistilledConference SEO – the practice of doing SEO for a site devoted to running a yearly conference. Applies to other regular events too I suppose, not just conferences. Turns out even the masters of SEO can’t get this one right – see how a search for either SES london or SMX advanced returns the page about last years event? If I was slightly dumber I might have turned up on the wrong dates:
Google search for SMX Advanced
I think it’s a pretty bad example to be showing off and gives the sites a bit of bad rep in my eyes. After all, you wouldn’t attend a web-design conference where the website looked like this would you?! (warning – train sounds may start playing uncontrollably if you visit that site).
How To Do SEO For Conference Sites
Now, designing a site architecture for a conference site (or site with a regular event) isn’t straightforward but equally it’s not rocket science. The best way of doing it is not to create new pages for each event but instead to have one standard page, the content of which changes each year. Like this:
Then to shift the old content onto a new URL once the conference has finished like this:
This means that your root page about the event gets all the links each year, the page becomes old and established and you simply refresh the content plenty of time before the event. This should ensure that the correct page ranks. This is the approach taken by both SMX and SES however and it’s still not working. Why is that?
The reason it’s not working in this case is that in fact the 07 pages have strong internal linking throughout both the SMX and SES sites. They also have a fair number of external links which makes me think that the 07 pages were created very shortly after the event (and hence everyone who blogged about it afterwards linked to the 07 page). I would recommend not creating the 07 page and moving the content until a few weeks after the event so that everyone who wants to talk about their experience still links to the root event page. This way the 07 pages should never gain enough weight to out-rank the main event page.
If all of this doesn’t work then there’s still plenty you can do such as hiding the pages behind robots.txt, editing the title tag of the 07 pages to make them less well optimised, using nofollow on internal links or even contacting people who link to the 07 page and asking them to link to the root page as well/instead! A last ditch effort would be to 301 the 07 pages onto the root page and move the 07 content onto a ‘past events’ page. All of these approaches though decrease the user experience so I would recommend looking at the internal linking as a priority and seeing how far that gets you.
I think the key takeaway from this post is to not forget about your brand searches. Even though you might own the top spots for a particular search always pay attention to which pages are taking those top spots and if they’re not directly relevant then do something about it!
Tom Critchlow Tom Critchlow is VP Operations for the NYC office, living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan. Fiercely curious about most things and passionate about everything.Follow @tomcritchlow
Tom Critchlow
I only realised the right date yesterday. lol
I think Will had the wrong dates in his calendar at one point too!
You think they’d know better really. Also where in the hell did you find that website, almost killed firefox.. lol
Adam – I think I did something like this: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=worst+website+digg&btnG=Search&meta=
then browsed around a bit
It took me a good fifteen seconds of examining the search results to work out what was wrong with them, too! In terms of events pages, this is especially important for events that take place early in a new year, as many people (like me) will momentarily forget that it’s not 2007 anymore and will have a tough time recognising the mistake. If it were November and a search result showed me details about WebmasterWorld Pubcon 2006, I’d be more likely to realise the incorrect date.
I like your proposed solutions, too: lots of options for rectifying the problem. Let’s see if the two companies get it sorted out!
That’s also a good point Jane – this is a much more pressing issue for SES than SMX given that SES is like soon! Having said that the SES site does go someway to correct the problem by having links at the top of the page to the right page etc.
Yep, already aware of the issue with Advanced and some of the older shows, and we have a system that already in place as you describe (and was in there before you described it).
Consider these: http://www.google.com/search?q=smx%20social http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=smx+london http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=smx+stockholm http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=smx+west
We shifted over to putting things at a root level with our social show (which was third in our series) and carried on with London and Stockholm. When we brought up the next year’s version of a show (as with social), we started redirecting over to make sure the links are flowing the right way to help on the rankings. Advanced is next up on the list.
Where we’re mainly behind is in getting the “you’re at last year’s show” for some of the older shows messages. And I’d love to get to the redirects faster to fix what we should have done right from the beginning, but you can’t get to everything at once.
Thanks for stopping by to comment Danny – nice to see you already have something in place to deal with the issue, I fear it is too late for SES London however!
Yay. Danny on our blog. Good post Tom
Glad (and not surprised) to see you’re on top of it, Danny.
Tom’s right about SES London though – I only realised a few days ago that I had the wrong date in my diary… The other thing they could do (even though it’s mainly too late as you say) is to at least change the title tag so it says something like: “a recap of 2007″.
Great point, Tom. It’s something that ALL time-sensitive publishers should consider. I’m definitely doing it with my “Team Profiles” section on the college basketball website I run. Last year’s are still posted, and will simply be replaced with the current year’s information as we get further and further into the season. Then, I’ll move the old one to a new post called something like “Duke-Blue-Devils-2007.”
Tom – great points – I was offline yesterday so didn’t get a chance to respond… that said, I pretty much have to re-iterate what Danny said. All Search Engine Strategies (and ClickZ) events will be dealt with at the root level, with past events moved to an archive folder. Not to mention the changes we have made to the meta data and site architecture. It’s not perfect but we will continue to improve and I can’t thank you enough for pointing this out.
It is surprising things weren’t done this way before. New structure/results here:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ses+chicago
There is no reason for us not to adhere to best practices.
Thanks for stopping by Matt – I have to admit I’m a little surprised more hasn’t been done to correct the SES London listing what with it being just round the corner (even if it’s as simple as changing the title tag of the 07 page temporarily to make people more aware it’s the old one?) but I’m glad you have things in hand for the other events.
Hopefully catch up with you at the aforementioned SES London
Great post and a good advert for SES London – I think alot of yearly events would benefit from following these tips
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