Should I use Rel-Canonicals links for a News site with similar articles each year

[YourMark.com]

Our small town news site provides coverage in a lot of seasonal areas, and we're struggling with the current year's content ranking above previous years.

For instance, every year we cover the local high school football team, and create 2-3 articles per game.  We'll also have some articles preseason with upcoming schedule and general team "talk".

We've seen where articles from past seasons will rank higher than the current season, presumably because the older articles have more links to them from other sources (among other factors).  We don't want to delete these old articles and 301 them to the newer article, since most articles include information/stories about specific players...and their families don't want the article to ever come down.

Should we rel-canonical the older articles to the newer one, or perhaps to the "high school football" category page?  If to the category page, should we rel-canonical even the new articles to that main category page?

Thanks for the help.

[GlobeRunner]

Typically the canonical tag should be used when content is duplicate--like when you have the same article appearing on one or more websites. I don't see any reason why you should be using the canonical tag, as those articles are unique.

Since the Google Panda algorithm might come into play here, though, the older articles may eventually hurt your site's search engine rankings if there are too many of them on the site. You might consider creating an archive of your content, perhaps on archive.yourdomain.com and then stopping the search engines from crawling that archive (but still making the article available to readers).

[EGOL]

I would make a permanent page for these.  The current year information would be displayed at the top of the page.  The archive would be readable below.

No redirects, no rel=canonical, fatter content, links accumulate over time, faster development in subsequent years.   Visitors will like it.

[BradsDeals]

I'd move the older articles into a /archive/ subfolder (keeping a site search function available) and then exclude the archive from indexing. The pages stay up and can be found on site by interested parties while newer material gets all the glory.

[YourMark.com]

Thanks for the feedback, and I'm leaning towards the archiving mentioned.

I have a follow-up on that though...in this high school football example, usually several times a year, we'll get a flood of traffic from a former student that did something "big" in college or pros.  Since we have articles that rank well for his name, due to coverage of him/her back in highschool, we'll often double/triple our normal monthly pageviews in a situation where the student receives national attention.

If I archive the articles (many 4-5 years old), then I'm assuming we'll lose the rankings for that former student's name, and therefore lose these burst of traffic we've seen in the past.

Thoughts?