I have an event directory that contains events with dates. These events can be annual.
When a user recreates the same event but with a future date that search result should be the one shown in Google Search, however the older event is showing up instead.
Is there a way to remove/hide/downgrade that older event so it doesn't get shown. I have removed all older events from my sitemap, and only included future events so far.
In your case, the best option is to keep the old page to speak about the recurrent event (in this case, don't put the date in URL; use an id instead). That way:
Otherwise, if you can't control this, you can 301 redirect all event pages to the new created by the user. Drawbacks of this is you need to keep an eye on pages creation by users and you lose some PageRank with the 301 redirects.
We all want to do that with Google, to show our last content, but it's not fully in our hand, it depends on the rate Google uses to visit you. However you can set your own rate for Google's crawler here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/settings?hl=en&siteUrl=http://yoursite.com.
But be careful, if you set the rate to very high that can screw your server.
