Sitemap and archived content?

Question

Is there any way to use a sitemap to indicate which part of a site represents current content and which part the 'archived' content?

Details on the issue I am trying to deal with, in case this is not the right approach:

I am helping a small non-profit convention optimise their site in the context of SEO. One of the things I am looking at is adopting a sitemap (sitemap.xml).

The way they organise their website is by having each convention year be a separate folder, rather than reusing the same paths:

• http://example.com/2014/
• http://example.com/2015/
• http://example.com/2016/

So when a new year happens they simply clone the previous year and then update the assets and content for the current year. This means we end up with:

• http://example.com/2014/registration/
• http://example.com/2015/registration/
• http://example.com/2016/registration/

The challenge is that this leaves Google pointing to the previous year's path for a while, even after the content for the new year is live. I have suggested we break away from the year folder structure, but there is push back, since some are concerned that this would break old off site links.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The Sitemaps.org protocol defines three optional elements that could be useful in your case:

• lastmod - "The date of last modification of the file."

• changefreq - "How frequently the page is likely to change."

  The value "never" should be used to describe archived URLs.

• priority - "The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site."

  Search engines may use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your most important pages are present in a search index.

So you could use:

<url>
  <loc>http://example.com/2014/registration</loc>
  <lastmod>2014</lastmod>
  <changefreq>never</changefreq>
  <priority>0.1</priority>
</url>

<url>
  <loc>http://example.com/2017/registration</loc>
  <lastmod>2017-03-20</lastmod>
  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.9</priority>
</url>

However, don’t expect consumers (like search engines) to make use of these hints; most consumers ignore these, probably.

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Other things you could do to give search engines hints which convention URLs to prefer (and to help visitors, too):

• Make sure that the date of the event is published in an accessible and machine-readable way, e.g., with HTML’s time element and possibly Schema.org’s startDate property.

• Link from all old event pages to the next (or current) event, e.g., with a banner in the header:

  This is an archived page of …. The [next event takes place from …].