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Cooney921

: Informing Googlebot for deprecated pages I publish timetables in my website. For example last year I published Number 2 bus Summer 2013 timetable. I has pretty good ranking on Google SERPs for

@Cooney921

Posted in: #Googlebot #Serps

I publish timetables in my website.
For example last year I published Number 2 bus Summer 2013 timetable.
I has pretty good ranking on Google SERPs for number 2 bus timetable

But this year I added a new page with the name "Number 2 bus Summer 2014 timetable".
When users search number 2 bus timetable in Google, they find 2013 timetable in first page of SERPs. But I want them to find 2014 timetable.

Thy can reach 2014 page with the keywords number 2 bus timetable 2014. But most of the users doesn't write year name.

So what's the proper way to say Googlebot that 2013 page is deprecated and newer version is 2014 page ?

I created a link from 2013 page to 2013 page and added a deprecation alert for visitors. But I still see 2013 timetable in first page of Google SERPs.

Of course it is possible to 301 redirect, 2013 page to 2014 page. But I want users to reach old pages to compare the differences between years.

(As you would guess I have many pages like this.)

Edit:
Why I don't put timetables on same page and show different years' timetables with sorting. Because my old pages has good pagerank scores or SERPs. Removing these old page will remove them.

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@Steve110

I would really have one main URL, which would show the calendar for the current year. If you do not currently have year encoded in your current top ranking page, then use just that one. Now on this page you can provide additional links to either calendars of previous years or have some sort of functionality to let users compare / see calendars from different years on the same page.

Also, optionally, in all the pages containing calendars for previous years, add the message on top that this is archived calendar with a link to the current one.

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@Sherry384

I would suggest taking the 2013 and any other previous page out of the index by using:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">


Or by blocking access to using your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /schedules/bus-schedule-2013.html


Of course this would be the fastest and surest way but may also be too draconian for your like.

Another possibility is that all of the bus schedules are in fact one single page where someone can use some sort of selection mechanism to chose the year, but it defaults to this year. That could be as simple as a single page with several years listed, or something that requires a bit of programming.

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