When you link to an event via blog post or Facebook, will it matter to you if that link ceases to work a few weeks later? How about a few years?
Is the description page for an event that happened in 2005 going to be worth preserving in 2020? Is it data glut or a useful historical resource?
Today I received a message along these lines from our web content editor:
There's something wrong with our website - Google searches on our events turn up ones that have happened as well as ones we are planning!
We don’t delete old events from our website, we just send them to the archives. That way any external links to the events will still take visitors somewhere useful. And they can then know where to find the next instance of that event! We doubt people are going to be very interested in reading the details of a single event years on, but we figure it is better to preserve the information for posterity.
This does mean occasionally older events outrank upcoming events in Google searches. All of them have their dates and years in the title or meta description, so at a glance it is fairly easy to see which ones are current and which are past.
To my mind, this is not a major issue. We know that the majority of event page hits are from our own homepage, then our Facebook fan page, then Twitter. Search engines come in fourth or fifth. Whether that's due to people preferring to use the first methods to find out about our events, or whether people are using search engines but are unable to use the results effectively, is something we would have to find out, however.
Searchability aside, the question of archiving old events remains. Is it worth keeping those pages online? We could update them with photos and info about the event once it passed – although realistically speaking our organisation lacks the staff to generate that volume of content.
I think it is worthwhile to keep the old pages accessible, so long as user testing supports my interpretation of our web analytics. Or maybe in addition to archiving events, we set noindex in robots.txt for those pages.
Then we just need to do a small amount of internal education to make sure other staff are aware of why it’s okay not to rank at the top of every possible search people can perform for an event. It’s important to do this, otherwise people begin to create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that don’t really connect with what actually determines online success. Poorly chosen KPIs tend to lead to a false sense of security when in fact we should be worrying, and a false state of emergency when in fact projects are achieving fantastic results – just not results quantified by the KPI.
If this topic interests you, you might enjoy Zeldman’s article on posthumous hosting and digital culture for a take on data generated by individuals. The strategies archivists are using to attempt to preserve digital information is also interesting – the National Archives of Australia have come up with some great archival tools also.