Google On What To Do With Old Event Pages

What do you do if you run an event and the event is over, do you keep the webpage live, do you redirect it, do you just delete it and 404 the page? The answer is it depends, as you’d imagine.

John said on Twitter “Is that old event what you want your site to be found for? If not, delete it and move on.”

If the event is a one-off event that you do not plan to recur annually or on some sort of schedule, then just delete the page when you are done. I mean, you can keep it live if you want to post event recaps and photos. But at this point, if you have no reason you want to rank for the page, you can safely just remove the page and not worry about it.

If the event happens on a regular basis, be it annually or whatever, and you have to re-promote the event each time you run it, then keep the page live. Keep the event page live, update it with the new information when you have it. So the new speakers, agenda, venue, timing and so on – when you have it. Do not remove the old event if the event will happen again in the future.

John Mueller said this a few times, as recently as last year around seasonal sales events and in 2017 more specifically around recurring events.

Here are those tweets:

Is that old event what you want your site to be found for? If not, delete it and move on.

— 🫧 johnmu of switzerland (personal) 🫧 (@JohnMu) July 29, 2022

Forum discussion at Twitter.