For the last couple of months, I’ve been paying a lot of attention (and money!) to backlinks and SEO.
And what I can tell from Google Analytics is… It works. My website is getting way more organic traffic.
My website is event-based, and I have collected events, to make it easier to investigate what you can explore with your friends, next time you are going to this city — this time of year.
But… Yes, there is a but.
Since it is event-based, and these events have an end date, so will the webpage. And in this case, there is a lot. It will happen every time I update the website with new events, which means, that events that have passed, will now disappear.
While tracking Behaviour on Google Analytics, a lot of these pages will redirect to the 404 page, since the event has appeared, and my website hasn’t been crawled since. The website is around 5000+ pages.
And until now, users will see a 404-page showing a message saying; This event has passed.
That is a pretty dull message. But something came to my mind.
I’m paying time and money for SEO, backlinking etc, and I see great results since I’m getting more organic traffic. But what is a visitor worth, if they are facing 404-pages?
Here is how I’m trying to solve it
Since the page/event is not existing anymore, there is not much data to listen to. But there is something. The URL!
It is impossible to make the perfect redirection for each user. If it was that specific event that led them to this website in the first place, the user will probably go back to Google right away.
But as mentioned earlier, my website's vision is to help people find events.
With queries in the URL, I can tell the city and the category. I can tell the date too, but that will most likely be past time - why they ended on 404-page in the first place.
To prevent confusing the user, there will be a toast message, telling them that the event they were looking for has passed.
From here, the website will search for other events, using the city and the category from the URL.
This way, there is still a chance, that you will keep the user on your page, and maybe it ends up with a great result.
Conclusion
This is just one example of many. This can happen every time, you are building pages from third-party APIs, that have changed since your last build with pages indexed on Search engines.
They arrived on your website — keep them on your website!
