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I have a few sites that are used exclusively to promote live events (ex. tradeshows, conference, etc). In most cases these sites content fewer than 100 pages and include information for the upcoming event with links to register. Some time after the event has ended, we would redesign the site and start promoting next years event...essentially starting over with a new site (same domain). We understand the value that many of these past event pages have for users who are looking for info from the past event and we're looking for advice on how best to archive this content to preserve for SEO. We tend to use concise urls for pages on these sites. Ex. www.event.com/agenda or www.event.com/speakers. What are your thoughts on archiving the content from these pages so we can reuse the url with content for the new event? My first thought is to put these pages into an archive, like www.event.com/2015/speakers. Is there a better way to do this to preserve the SEO value of this content?

We have a website and domain -- which is well-established (since 1998) -- that we are considering breaking apart for business reasons. This is a content site that hosts articles from a few of our brands in portal fashion. These brands are represented in print with their own magazines so it's important to keep their presence separate. All of the content on the site is related to a general industry, with each brand covering a unique segment in the industry. For example, think of a toy industry site that hosts content from it's brands covering stuffed animals, electronics and board games. The current thinking is to break out the content from a couple brands to their own sites and domains. The business case for this branding purposes. I'm of the opinion that this is a bad idea as we would likely see a noticeable decline in search traffic across the board, which we rely on for impressions for our advertisers. If we take the appropriate steps to carefully redirect pages to the new domains what kind of hit should we expect to take from this transition? Would it make much difference if we were transition from 1 to 2 sites vs 1 to 4? Should this move be avoided all together? Any advise would be appreciated.

We have an engineering website (chemengonline.com) that publishes regularly, including content from our print magazine. In the magazine we have a section called "Chementators" where we highlight new innovations in chemical engineering. These are typically briefs and are often unique from one another. Last year we would group these briefs on a page like this http://www.chemengonline.com/november-chementator-briefs-5/. We recently relaunched our website and in the process decided to break the briefs apart into their own articles like this http://www.chemengonline.com/metal-free-atrp/. Considering the short length of the briefs but technical nature of the content, would you advise keeping them separate or going back to the old way of grouping them together on the same page? And if we group them, could you offer some advice on page title... Ex. "Chementators for February 2015" vs "Chementators - Graphene, Clean Power, Large Scale CCS, Nanoparticles, etc"

We recently sold our established domain -- for a compelling price -- and now have the task of transitioning to our new domain. What steps would you recommend to lesson the anticipated decline from search engines in this scenario?

We host an event every year which updates it's branding to include the year (Ex. Acme 2013, Acme 2014, etc.). We used to use the branded domains (acme2012.com) to redirect to the event microsite on off of our main content site (ex. acme2012.acme.com). Just this year our event managers decided host the event on it's own domain, separating it from the content site. So it is now acme2013.com. Their strategy is to update the domain every year to include the current year, so next year the domain would be acme2014.com. I understand the use of the domain for marketing purposes but I feel like it could be hurting our SEO by doing this. Should we revert to our original strategy or is this okay with the proper setup? I should note that because this is an event promotion site, the site template and content updates every year.

I'm working with a publisher who has a young blog that is 6 mos old and is considering folding it and moving it's archive of content into a relavent, more mature website. This blog already has numerous links directing readers to this more mature website. My question is would it make more sense to leave the blog in place and continue to publish new posts and benefit from the link relationship with the mature website? Considering the blog is relatively new, would it matter much if we folded and moved it's archive?

I'm working with a publisher who is considering reorganizing the content on their site, which up to now has been presented more or less as a portal site for a variety of segments in a particular business industry. One scenario that is on the table is to remove some content sections altogether and republish them under their own unique domains. It's important to note that this reorganization would be part of a new brand strategy. So my first question is whether this is one of those avoid-at-all-costs scenarios? My second question is if we decide to procede, what kind of time could it take for these new domains to generate the same level of search traffic they are currently pulling in on the portal site? Thanks!