Archiving System - is it thing of the past?

[beritv]

My IT is convinced that we should build one for our webiste as we have an event page that changes content quite rapidly. It is an expensive implementation process. I googled around and don't see anything. Also everything I've learned about SEO, I've never seen this mentioned anywhere. Not sure where to position myself because of lack of knowledge/information. Anyone has experience or opinions?

My natural suggestion would be to have excelling content on static pages that will have strong SERP regardless of archiving and the content that changes, will just keep changing and rank however it will. Or?

[benesmartin]

Hey there,

If I understand it correctly, you want to build a website just for the archiving?

In this case, it wouldn't make much sense, since the content could help you in the main website instead.

It seems you have a lot of content which would be very useful for longtail rankings. The more content on one site the better.

Cheers, Martin

[R0bin_L0rd]

Hi there beritv, could you share some more information about this question? It would be good to get confirmation on a few points:

• What is the main purpose of the event page? I'm picturing a listings page which frequently changes because events are added and taken away, and includes either scroll loading or pagination for the latter results but someone I've chatted with about this thinks it could also be a static page which has changing details for a specific event.
• Which pages are we talking about archiving? Expired individual event pages?
• What is the nature of the archiving we're discussing? How would it work? I can see that Martin is asking whether it's a separate site (in which case I wouldn't recommend it particularly from an SEO perspective because if it's indexable it might start to compete with your live site). The person I've chatted with has asked whether this is a process of deindexing or taking offline the pages. If you could clarify that, it would help a lot.
• Are your IT dept. recommending this as an information store or are they citing SEO reasons?

If the concern is having lots of out-of-date event pages there may be file management and UX considerations to take into account - if having lots of defunct event pages makes your CMS unmanageable then it seems reasonable to have a way of refiling them there but that doesn't necessarily have to be reflected in the live site. On the other hand, are you seeing users landing on event pages for which the event has passed? If so, that's not fantastic UX and is likely to lead to them leaving your site immediately and clicking on another result which would have an SEO impact because it's sending consistent messages to Google that you're not fulfilling the search intent.