What is the best way to handle annual events on a website?

[Brando16]

Every year our company has a user conference with between 300 - 400 attendees. I've just begun giving the event more of a presence on our website. I'm wondering, what is the best way to handle highlights from previous years? Would it be to create an archive (e.g. www.companyname.com/eventname/2015) while constantly updating the main landing page to promote the current event? We also use an event website (cvent) to handle our registrations. So once we have an agenda for the current years event I do a temporary redirect from the main landing page to the registration website. I don't really like this practice and I feel like it might be better to keep all of the info on the main domain. Wondering if anybody has any opinions or feedback on that process as well.

Just looking for best practices or what others have done and have had success with.

[EGOL]

We have a website with a page that links to events in our industry.

Most of the events have a single homepage that is updated every year.  These homepages have a description of the upcoming event and links to agendas, registration, lodging, sponsors, speakers, exhibitors, past year highlights, etc.   If you do this your search engine visibility will develop over time because almost everyone that links to your event will link to this single page year after year, for all of their websites, and every time they mention the event over time.   Also, repeat visitors will be familiar and getting information, registering and finding lodging is "just like they did last year".

However, other events change the URL and everything else every year.   This is a really bad idea because employees at businesses like mine, who link to events, will be snarling when they see that you have changed the URL again and must go on a treasure hunt to find it.  Potential attendees will have trouble finding your event too.   We have stopped linking to some of these events because finding the new pages, updating the links, and editing information is too demanding of employee time.  We have not deleted a lot of events.  Just the ones that are pain in the butt.  When they get in touch with us to complain we tell them, let us know when you are done playing musical URLs.

[Brando16]

So it sounds like you create an archive for the previous years event? Moving the previous years highlights to another page so it can still be accessed?

The url on our registration site changes but we redirect the main landing page to that url temporary. I think ideally the content for the event should be on the main domain and just utilize the third part event site to manage the registrations.

Seems like there are so many ways to do this.

[ThompsonPaul]

Yup, there are many ways to do it, but it's vastly superior (I'd say critical) in terms of ongoing ranking and traffic generation to keep the primary content on a consistent URL the main domain. It's also vastly better for user experience as well.

Ad EGOL recommends, definitely keep the URL on your own site consistent from year to year. Create the archives of each year's highlights as children of the primary page, and make sure you are linking to the current year's page from each of the year-archive pages. This give Search Engines a clear understanding of the relative hierarchy and currency of the pages.

Do NOT 302 this page to the registration page. Simply add a call-to-action on the primary page to the registration page. You must have lots of good conference-related content on the primary page, not just a thin paragraph and a link to the reg page. You'll then want - if at all possible - to have the reg page (especially after successful registration) to redirect the visitor back to the primary page to give the followup info after registration.

Ideally, you'll want to be able to insert your Analytics tracking code on the reg site as well, and then configure cross-domain tracking for it. That way you can easily track conversions. At the very least, if you can't set up your own Analytics on the reg page, add a referral exclusion for it so the visitor coming back from the reg page doesn't show as a new visit on the primary page. You can then add conversion tracking to that return page.

These recommendations come from a background managing sites running up to 425 events per year, often with ticketing handled on a third-party site.

Hope that all makes sense?

Paul

[Brando16]

Thank you Paul,

This is exactly what I needed. I've been trying to push us in this direction but it's sometimes hard to break old habits. We might even be able to save a bit of money going this route.

Thank again for the input!

-Brandon