Archiving web content annually. One site or sites by year?

Question

I run scientific conferences and over the past 15 years have amassed tens of thousands of abstracts, videos, and digital posters from presentations. Over the last couple of years we've started creating specific sites to hold that year's conference data for pre-meeting marketing purposes, e.g.

• conference2012.org
• conference2011.org
• etc.

But now my clients are asking that their entire archives be made public on the web. The actual work involved in doing this is trivial but I can't decide what is the best way to structure it. Should I have one large site (conference.org) and load all of the content into it using the year as a top-level category or should I continue to work backwards by year (conferenceYEAR.org)? What is the best from a user-experience standpoint? From an SEO standpoint?

Answer 1

You should have everything on one site with a home page where users can click on a link for the year they are interested in. Why not Wikipedia-style? On your home page you could have info about the current or upcoming conference or news about the participants/speakers. You could redirect the years to sub-folders on your server. The URL structure would be something like:

• conference.org/2012
• conference.org/2011

Should also be best from a SEO point of view because your back-links do not get divided between multiple domains or sub-domains.

It would also be cheaper because you only have to pay for one domain name and they don't all count against the number of domains your hosting account allows.