Duplicate content on events site

[dragonflo]

I have an event website and for every day the event occurs the event has a page.

For example: The Oktoberfest in Germany the event takes 16 days. My site would have 16 (almost)identical pages about the Oktoberfest(same text, adres, photos, contact info). The only difference between the pages is the date mentioned on the page. I use rich snippets.

How does google treat my pages and what is the best practice.

[SamuelScott]

If I were Google or even a website visitor, I would ask: Why does every single day of the event need its own page in the first place? It would seem frustrating from both search engine and user standpoints. The website should first and foremost be created with the user experience in mind.

I'm guessing that the answer is that each day will have its own set of event photos. (One page for January 1 photos, one for January 2 photos, and so on -- whenever the dates are.) But that's redundant -- needlessly repetitive, in other words. At most, I would probably place each year in a subfolder -- home.com/2012, home.com/2013, and home.com/2014 and so on. Then each year's subfolder would just have further subfolders each for photos, information, and so on.

Don't make it needlessly complicated. I'm guessing you're trying to get traffic from each specific day from this method, but you most likely don't need to do that. It will just appear to have too much needless duplication both for users and search engines.

If I'm missing something, let me know and I'll reply further!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

I would use a canonical tag and point to the first page of the event to make sure you don't get into any issues with duplicate content. I think it has some value for a user to have all the 16 pages online but for Google it's pretty useless to leave them out there and also notify them that they all exist. Using a canonical will 'merge' them a bit into one.