Prevent the wrong (ticket|home) pages from ranking in search results

[jdevalk]

Describe the bug

Every year we go through multiple rounds of this:

"When I Google WordCamp , the <ticket page|homepage> is ranking above the ".

To reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to Google
2. Search for "WordCamp US tickets"
3. See that the 2023 page ranks above the 2024 tickets page.

Expected behavior

You expect to land in the right spot immediately.

Screenshots / Screencasts

See this screenshot. Please realize that even though the first result looks like it's the 2024 result, it's actually the 2023 result:

Proposed solution

We actually have all sorts of solutions in place for this already, canonical links pointing to the right place, etc. But none of that works, because it's working around the fact that we're basically "doing it wrong".

• The homepage of an event should be <city|eventname>.wordcamp.org without the year. For example: us.wordcamp.org, europe.wordcamp.org, netherlands.wordcamp.org, etc.
• The tickets page of an event should <city|eventname>.wordcamp.org/tickets/ without the year.
• After the WordCamp has happened, we could move the homepage to <city|eventname>.wordcamp.org/<year>/.
• The tickets page should never be moved and just be closed down at that point.
• All of the other pages can have the year in them from the start, as that means those links never need to be changed.

There's a massive SEO benefit to doing this. Right now, to rank for WordCamp <city>, you are basically always competing with the previous version of the same event. By making the change above, the links that the event gathered last year will actually help this year's version of the event rank better. So, instead of competing with last year, you're benefitting from last year's success.

[kcristiano]

I do like this approach. Each Camp's curent "edition" would not have the year attached. I am assuming that we'd archive the site and at that point include the year "2023" or whatever the year was for historical purposes. Is that correct @jdevalk

This also does not look at the `events.wordpress.org' sites which end up with URLs like this one https://events.wordpress.org/barcelona/2024/somos/ where we have the city/year/name Do we want to address this as well here?

[dorsvenabili]

I agree with this proposal to solve this SEO issue and I have the same question as Kevin. Thank you!

[jdevalk]

Let's maybe tackle the events one separately? I'm absolutely fine tackling that one too, but don't want to make the scope of this issue bigger than it needs to be?

[kcristiano]

Let's maybe tackle the events one separately? I'm absolutely fine tackling that one too, but don't want to make the scope of this issue bigger than it needs to be?

That makes sense to me. We can create another issue to track the events SEO issues.

[renintw]

Related Discussion: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C08M59V3P/p1717000539205949
Fix Missing Banner: #1338