Best practice in naming event websites

This article makes a small observation regarding how event websites could be named for a better SEO advantage.

It’s a common practice these days to create a website for any event/conference/summit/show. Whether it is BangaloreIT.biz (formerly BangaloreIT.com and bangaloreit.in, may be they will rename it again to BengaluruIT.biz?) or Pravasi Bharatiya Divas or any other event, all will usually have a dedicated website.

If the event is an annual one, to be held every year, is it a good idea to include event year in the domain name? I feel no.

In other words, having a website like www.connect2008.in or www.reverberations08.com which includes the year 2008 or 08 is a bad practice. Addresses like www.hanoverfair.com or www.pbdindia.org are a good way to name a website for annual event, as they exclude reference to any specific year in the domain name.

Let us check why.

If you include the year in the domain name, it becomes redundant for next season. Next year you’ll be required to buy a new name like connect2009.in and rebuild/migrate the site. This may not be a concern, as money involved in buying a domain and setting up a site is quite small. The biggest disadvantage will be the loss of search engine benefits. During the current season you might have advertised heavily about the event and lots of websites and blogs might have linked to your event website in their articles. Next year, if you ditch the current site and move to a new one, all think links become redundant and you fail to leverage the google advantage secured by means of these links.

You can always have “EventName-2008” in the site title, which can be effortlessly edited to 2009 next year. But I feel having it in domain name should be avoided.

Also, one should plan the design in such a way that there won’t be any need to move/replace contents. For example eventname.com/speakers.html is a bad idea. It should be eventname.com/2008/speakers.html so that next year this can be eventname.com/2009/speakers.html, instead of having to move/replace last year’s content

Further, suppose you’ve set up eventname2008.com for this year’s event. If some smart individual registers eventname2009.com ahead of you, you’ll be forced to compromise on your identity and settle with say eventname09 or some other combinations, while the culprit gets effortless traffic/publicity

Just my opinion-organizers are at their liberty to chose any name as they wish.

Also read: Prateek Dayal on "What to look for in a web designing Company"

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