301 redirect or Link back from old to new pages

[gigantictickets]

Hi all,

We run a ticket agent, and have multiple events that occur year after year, for example a festival.

The festival has a main page with each event having a different page for each year like the below:

Main page
http://www.gigantic.com/leefest-tickets (main page)

Event pages:
http://www.gigantic.com/leefest-2010-tickets/hawksbrook-lane-beckenham/2009-08-15-13-00-gce/11246a
http://www.gigantic.com/leefest-2010-tickets/highhams-hill-farm-warlingham/2010-08-14-13-00-gce/19044a
http://www.gigantic.com/leefest-2011-tickets/highhams-hill-farm-warlingham/2011-08-13-13-00-gce/26204a
http://www.gigantic.com/leefest-2012-tickets/highhams-hill-farm-warlingham/2012-06-29-12-00-gce/32168a
http://www.gigantic.com/leefest-2013/highhams-hill-farm/2013-07-12-12-00

my question is: Is it better to leave the old event pages active and link them back to the main page, or 301 redirect these pages once they're out of date? (leave them there until there is a new event page to replace it for this year)

If the best answer is to leave the page there, should i use a canonical tag back to the main page? and what would be the best way to link back? there is a breadcrumb there now, but it doesn't seem to obvious for users to click this.

Keywords we're aming for on this example are 'Leefest Tickets', which has good ranking now, the main page and 2012 page is listed.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Unless there's a valid user reason to keep the outdated pages in place, my recommendation would be to implement a 301 redirect from the previous year to the current year's page.  It's the cleanest user experience and sends proper ranking value to the current year.  If no event takes place in a given year the 301 redirect should be to the main page for that event.