What to Do When Your Website Is about Events?

[loveseo]

Hi Everyone,

I have a rather specific issue that I could use some thoughts on.

I have websites that are related to sports and as such I publish articles related to sports events.

What I normally do is to put the team names, plus league, plus match date in the title tag, meta description, URL and of course mention this in the content.

However, after a while it gets messy as the same teams eventually meet again or even if they don't, Google seems to get confused.

So what happens is that Google often shows old pages about old events that mention one of the teams that are playing in that specific match.

What is the best solution here?

Since it's a news-like site, it doesn't seem a good idea to delete old posts and redirect them.

But how to avoid confusing Google and having your pages compete against each other?

Thanks!

 

[mmm91492]

If you don't already, you could try marking your posts up with Schema: http://schema.org/Event

If you make sure to get the event date/time marked up correctly, there's no way Google can't figure out that it's a past event. I'm honestly surprised it doesn't already without the markup.

 

[loveseo]

Thanks for your suggestion.

I have tried that already, but Google is still confused. What's worse is that it also confuses the sports themselves.

Let's say I have a page about a soccer match between Germany and Austria. And I rank for the keywords "germany austria european championships final" which is happening in the next couple of days. Google will actually show an old page about a handball match between the two countries.

And what's worse, as the event approaches all the top results will be overtaken by spam. By spam I mean keyword stuffed pages about live streaming that match that are created on platforms like Facebook, the Russian VK social network, and similar.

I really don't know what to do to outrank these spam pages and stop my own pages from competing.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I wish I had a fix but I don't, none that are satisfactory.

You could no-index the old posts, but that sucks when you can take advantage of the compounding traffic you start to get as you collect old posts.

You might see some results with using a canonical on the pages that rank that you don't want to, pointing them at the one you want, but that's about as bad as no-indexing.

The problem sounds like Google isn't treating these terms as queries that deserve freshness. There's also the issue of the horrendous spam that's in every sporting event niche and in the movie and TV industry too. Those are two things you can't do anything about.

In my mind, you're facing a triple-threat uphill battle. My question would be whether or not it's worth continuing down that path. If you're not too entrenched I'd consider bailing. If you are, I'd pivot and try to build a forum to capture and retain users, or possibly still bail. That's if SEO is your main method of attack.

How substantial are these posts that you're creating on these topics? I wonder if that could be part of the issue. If Google determines all of your posts aren't that good (200 word news posts), it's going to pull the one that has the most going for it, which might simply be age. Which could explain why older posts are popping up instead of the new ones.

 

[Tiberian]

Thanks for your suggestion.

I have tried that already, but Google is still confused. What's worse is that it also confuses the sports themselves.

Let's say I have a page about a soccer match between Germany and Austria. And I rank for the keywords "germany austria european championships final" which is happening in the next couple of days. Google will actually show an old page about a handball match between the two countries.

And what's worse, as the event approaches all the top results will be overtaken by spam. By spam I mean keyword stuffed pages about live streaming that match that are created on platforms like Facebook, the Russian VK social network, and similar.

I really don't know what to do to outrank these spam pages and stop my own pages from competing.

I think I can be of some assistance, especially since I happen to work with a company that's in the events industry.
A typical "hack" that a lot of these spammers use is they will create pages on event sites like Eventbrite or Ticketbud, which have really high page strength. They then use web 2.0's to link to these pages. Some of these pages are so innately powerful that they rank alongside branded terms. Have you ever tried doing the same thing, except linking to your posts instead?

To be honest I don't know that there is a perfect solution, especially since in most cases, you'll get penalized for thin-slicing and that's what a lot of these pages tend to appear to be, even though they aren't. Getting these posts linked to on these event pages will help out a lot.

The other alternative with schema is that you need to also use a location in there. I've noticed that schema that involves a location is updated a lot more often. There is also a cool thing where if you search for that location (i.e. a soccer field) you will often see events listed there.

Hope that helps you out!

 

[animalstyle]

If you've got some coding skills, you could possibly categorize events together by teams or types or similar. Then use the date that the event is taking place to create some logic that shows a 'more recent event' or 'similar events' at the top of a page - IF the user should be redirecting to a more current page. In essence, you'd create some logic to constantly create links to the most current page.