We have all seen it happen. We search for an event, such as a conference or a festival, only to discover the top listing is for the previous year’s event. And if you are doing a quick search to see dates just from the search results alone, it can be very easy to confuse the dates listed in this first search result as being the correct dates for the current year’s event.

When you consider it, Google’s technically ranking it as it should be because all the links are pointing to the event page that has already happened. But obviously from a user experience point of view, those users expect to see this year’s event listed at the top, and don’t expect to see it outranked by an older version of the same event.

The question came up in the Google webmaster help hangout today and John Mueller laid out some best practices that webmasters can use to deal with this specific problem.

This is something that is always kind of tricky because usually what happens is the older years collect a lot more information and a lot more signals around the previous versions of the conference, or if you have different product models and the older models have a lot of press around them, a lot of links around and a lot of signals we picked up on them, so if you’re searching for the product name, we might show the older version first because we think it’s most relevant one.

One thing we’ve seen people do that essentially works here is that you have one generic URL you can use for your product or conference, so you have your conference.com and on the homepage you have the current version.  And when it comes time to creating a new version for the next year, you move the current one to archive and say this is 2014 and then you put the new version on the homepage.

So you kind of reuse the main URL over and over again and that we know this is actually the most relevant version that we should be showing up search, but there’s also this archived version so we have this information or archive as well. So this really helps.

We have seen this a lot as conferences are dealing with this more and more. They either always have the current event on the homepage or on the generic directory – such as www.example.com/conferencename/ then put the archived ones on www.example.com/conferencename/archive2014/ or www.example.com/archive2014/

Obviously, this won’t always work as well for products, especially if you continue to sell the older version, but you could approach it as a generic product type landing page.