Seo: tell search engines to prioritize a given subdirectory

Question

Imagine a website of a recurring event.
The URL structure is:

• http://example.org/2022/ - subdirectory about the 2022 edition of the event
• http://example.org/2021/ - subdirectory about the 2021 edition of the event
• …
• http://example.org/ - a 302 HTTP redirect to the current year edition, e.g. http://example.org/2022/

This URL strategy allows the users to get to the current year edition anytime just browsing to http://example.org, and to read about the past editions browsing to the other year's subdirectories.

The problem comes when search engines are involved. When I search "Example Org" through a search engine, I would expect to get as first result the freshest edition of the event, namely http://example.org/2022, or http://example.org.

Unfortunately, search engines prefer to show first several past editions, because such content is usually better ranked since it has longer texts, more pages, and across the web there are more links to those rather than to the new edition's ones.

How can I tell search engines that when it comes to my domain I want them to give priority to a certain subdirectory (e.g. http://example.org/2022)?

Answer 1

The best way to deal with this is to have a URL for the latest event that doesn't change. Something like: http://example.org/current/ (Or maybe even just http://example.org/) Then when you create a new event, you archive the pages for the previous event to a subdirectory.

For example, the 2022 event might still be coming up so you would move last year's pages to http://example.org/2021/ and create a link to it, maybe in the "archives" or "previous events" section of your site. If there are pages that are specific to that year's event you could redirect them.

Doing it this way concentrates all your rankings on the pages that matter the most: the new event. Search engines don't have to switch to indexing different pages every year. You will also get much better link juice from external links to your current event because all the links from previous years events will boost it.

This URL strategy is recommend by Google's John Mueller:

Doing it this way will help the generic URL to gain value over the years, while still allowing the older versions to be accessible if someone explicitly looks for them. Another advantage of this setup is that it’s trivial for folks to find and go to the current version.

Answer 2

While I'm not convinced that your URI strategy is optimized for maximum SEO, you should be able to accomplish your objective of telling search engines to prioritize the pages in a given subdirectory (e.g. /2022/ instead of /2021/) with canonical links.

The only drawback would be since you can only add canonical links to pages and not the whole directory, you would have to place a canonical link on each of the pages from the previous years and point them to their current counterpart. If any pages in previous versions have been done away with, they would still appear in the search results since there is no fresh content.

Remember that canonicals are used to point duplicate content to the most relevant version; they should not be nested. So although your URI structure would not change, the canonical links would have to be added to the new pages and adjusted on all the other pages each year.

Depending on the number of pages/yr and how long your event has existed, this might be simple or overwhelming. But this is the only way to achieve your goal without changing your URIs.

Assuming you can access the HTML directly without needing a plugin, creating a canonical tag for /2021/events and pointing it to /2022/events would require adding this to the document head.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.org/2022/events" />

If you decide to use this method, I have provided below a good reference on canonical links to explain more thoroughly and help avoid any costly mistakes.

Canonical URLs – Best Practices, Common Mistakes & Their Impact on SEO