: My archives are beating my current content, how do I stop from competing against myself? I've inherited a site with about 15,000 pages going back 16 years. Often current events are outranked

@Mendez628

Do your URLs contain the date in them? IE example.com/awesome-event-2009
If they don't and are just event pages IE example.com/awesome-event I would move the old content to a new archive page and put this years content on the page that is already ranking well with a link to the archive at the bottom.

This way you don't have new pages trying to out rank old established pages, and it works better for the user because they can bookmark that one page and always return for the most up to date info on the event.

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@Shakeerah822

I would not try to "kill off" traffic to the old content. I would link to relevant new content in the old content that's getting the traffic.

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@Mendez628

You can:


Add a big link at the top of every old page linking to the corresponding current events page - this will let visitors easily find the current page and signal to search engines the new page is the important page.
Submit an XML sitemap to all the major search engines, sitemaps have a priority field that let you specify what are the important pages.
Add <link rel="canonical">(explanation of link rel canonical) to the old pages to tell the search engines to go to the newer version (use with care, this is not the purpose of canonical so it may have side effects, it may get your old pages de-indexed, it may transfer rank or not, it's also quite possible it will do nothing and for all I know there's a chance it will cause flying monkey to burst out of your screen on the next Google algorithm update)


I would do the first 2 and wait for a few weeks to see it it helps, don't do point 3 unless you really want to, I'm leaving it here for completeness only.

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