To update or not to update news URLs ?
-
We manage a huge daily news website in my small country - keeping this a bit mysterious in case competitors are reading
Our URL structure is www.companyname.com/news/categoryofnews/title-of-article?id=articleid
In this hyperreactive news world, title of articles change frequently (may be ten times a day for the main stories). The question we debate is : should we reflect the modification of the title in the URL or not ?
Example : "Trump says he wants to ban search engines" would have URL http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-says-he-wants-to-ban-search-engines?id=12345678
Later in the day the title becomes "Trump denies he suggested banning search engines". Should the URL be modified to http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-denies-he-suggested-banning-search-engines?id=12345678 (option A) or not (option B) ?
In Google News it makes no difference because of the sitemap, but in Google organic things are different.
At present (option B in place), Google apparently doesn't see that the article has been updated, and shows the initial timestamp which is visually (and presumably SEOwise) not good : our new news looks like old news. Modifiying the URL would solve that issue, but could, may be, create another one : the new URL, being considered a new article, would lose, the acquired weight of the previous one in terms of referrals, social trafic and so on. Or not ? What do you think is the best option ?
Thanks for your expertise,
Yves
-
I try to balance the pros and cons of updating the URL, given that both point to the same article (in the http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-says-he-wants-to-ban-search-engines?id=12345678 URL, only the articleid is used by the db to fetch the article, all text content before the ?id= is irrelevant), so it's not the issue of losing trafic.
Pro of udating is having a fresher timestamp displayed in google organic. That's for sure.
Con is the fact that google could induce from the fresher timestamp that it's a "new" article and that all its accumulated weight (referrals, social mentions...) would be lost. That's not for sure, and that's why I'm looking for advice.
Best,
Yves
-
By "... loss of referencing," what precisely do you mean? From your question it appeared you were mostly worried about the timestamp issue in web or all search on Google?
Are you worried you change the article so much that given info would no longer be in it?From a news perspective, the timestamp is informative and, I believe, important. Is there the ability to add an update to that which would show near the timestamp? So the story is three blind mice arrested for jaywalking today. Then in two days breaking news: Mouse B freed due to technicality in arrest! Is there a way to have **"Update 2016.04.01" **show in bold at beginning of article so that timestamp seen by searcher is likely ignored?
Best
-
Thanks Robert. I probably need to be more precise on one point. Both option A and option B lead to the same page, because the ?id=articleid is the only part of the URL taken into account by the db server. So we are not going to get any 404's. What I worry about is the loss of referencing linked to the original URL wording, if I may say so.
-
Thanks Eric. I probably need to be more precise on one point. Both option A and option B lead to the same page, because the ?id=articleid is the only part of the URL taken into account by the db server. So we are not going to get any 404's. What I worry about is the loss of referencing linked to the original URL wording, if I may say so.
-
Eric, in your last line did you mean to say just update the story? It sounds as if you are saying don't change the URL, update it. Just trying to give Yves clarity.
Best
-
i would definitely not change the URLs. Once a page is crawled and indexed, you should leave it there--and update that page as necessary. Other sites may link to it (and you may then lose the links or they'll to 404 errors) if you change the URL. You may also have social media links out there to the article that are shared. If someone clicks on it from social media, then it would then go to an old story if you change the URL.
Generally it's better to NOT change the URL of the page unless it's a new story, requiring a new article. If it's the same story, then you should just update the current URL.
-
Yves,
Great question and I do think you already know the answer. IMO I would not update the URLs because you could end up chasing your tail. If you change the URL are you going to 301 every time you change it? If not, anyone who linked to the article or bookmarked pre change is lost.
Anecdotally, a year or more ago I started noticing on a major sports mag online that starts with S and ends in I they were changing titles regularly. Frankly, I don't have much time for reading sports so I need to get the info and go. As a fan of the Mavericks for instance, I would read an article that was Dirk Sets Record and think great cause I like the big German. Then a day later I would see an article that was Another Record! and when I clicked on it... was the one I had already read the day before. My guess now is that they change their titles like I change my socks. When I saw your question I did a quick test and they are not changing the URLs on the two I found.
I hope this helps you a bit.
Robert
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Updated page not ranking.
Hi Guys. Bit flummoxed by this. I've recently updated our Mid year diaries page to be this years mid year products. i.e) Diaries that go from 2015-16 not 2014-15. Last year we rank really well for the search term 'mid year diaries 14-15'. All i've done is update the page to be focused on 2015-16 diaries, but when i type in 'mid year diaries 15-16' it's no where to be seen in the SERP. Even our home page is ranking higher! I'm really puzzled about this, nothings changed apart from the year! The only reason I can think of is that Google is reading the file name of the images which are related to lasts years products? For example the file name might say mid year diary 2014-15. Do you think this is what's effecting us? Very puzzling 😕 I've submitted it through Webmaster tool btw 🙂 Isaac.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
Is it still worth changing a url with half the pages target keyphrase in to the entire phrase still ?
Hi If a pages url has half the pages target keyphrase (i.e. 1 word instead of 2) is it still worth changing to include entire keyphrase (2 words) given need to then add 301 redirects etc after ? If it was a new page then I would definately include full keyphrase but the page is a few months old and has quite high page authority as is (i know a 301 should transfer most authority) but given this page and other sub pages would also need to be 301'd if this change occurs and the dev time/cost that would incurred/charged by the design/dev agency. Also thinking Google being cleverer now (the pages content will be about the target kw) so thinking G would work it out from rest of page content and partial match kw in url. In other words to best target keyphrase is it best to leave url as is or change url to include keyphrase ? For example if the pages target kw is 'swimming clubs' and the current url is www.franksleisurecentres.com/clubs changing it to www.franksleisurecentres.com/swimming-clubs :Thanks Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Can I force an update of Grade Reports?
It looks like my weekly crawl has finished, but my Grade Reports still reflect last week. Is there a way to manually update them, or do I just have to wait it out?
On-Page Optimization | | FDAitsupport0 -
Directory site with an URL structure dilemma
Hello, We run a site, which lists local businesses and tag them by their nature of business (similar to Yelp). Our problem is, that our category and sub-category(i.e.: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant or www.example.com/budapest/cars/spare-parts) pages are extremely weak, and get almost no traffic, but most of the traffic (95+ percent) goes for the actual business pages. While this might be a completely normal thing, I still would like to strengthen our category (listing) pages as well, as these should be the ones targeted by some of general keywords, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘restaurant+budapest’. One of the issues I have identified as a possible problem, that we do not have a clear hierarchy within the site, so while the main category pages are linked from the homepage (and the sub-categories from here), there is no bottom-up linking from the business pages back to the category pages, as the business page URLs look like this: www.example.com/business/onyx-restaurant-budapest. I think, that the good site- and url structure for the above would be like this: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant/hungarian/onyx-restaurant. My only issue is, perhaps not with the restaurants but with others, that some of the businesses have multiple tags, so they can be tagged i.e. as car saloon, auto repair and spare parts at the same time. Sometimes, they even have 5+ tags on them. My idea is, that I will try to identify a primary tag for all the businesses (we maintain 99 percent of them right now), and the rest of their tags would be secondary ones. I would then use canonicalization and mark the page with the primary tag in the url as the preferred one for that specific content. With this scenario, I might have several URLs with the same content (complete duplicates), but they would point to one page only as the preferred one, while our visitors could still reach the businesses in any preferred ways, so either by looking for car saloons, auto-repair or spare parts. This way, we could also have breadcrumbs on all the pages, which now we miss completely. Can this be a feasible scenario? Might it have a side-effect? Any hints on how to do it a better way? Many thanks, Andras
On-Page Optimization | | Dilbak0 -
Does it make any difference to your SEO if the homepage infrequently updates.
Hi everyone! Working on a site and the homepage hardly ever updates. Probably 3/4 times per year. The only page on the site which does is the blog page which updates 4 times per week. Is this a bad thing? Is there anything I should attempt to do?
On-Page Optimization | | RankStealer0 -
How do i chaneg a url without losing pre-existing linkjuice?
my client has a page on his site: www.revisitors.com/REF/TEST the page is for a free traffic offer...i have this page currently ranking 25th or so for "free traffic" - a great keyword to rank for to promote this offer with..... i want the url to be www.revisitors.com/free-traffic.html and then change the title tags to free traffic | free targeted traffic or something along those lines....i have hardly put in any linkbuilding work at all to get to 25 - it was a surprise but now that we are there i want to tighten things up and optimize as well as possible.... how do i do this without losing previously built linkjuice and without having a duplicate content issue for having both pages exist with a 301 redirect.... if i am wrong about something please dont hesitate to set me straight...i am only masquerading as an seo expert these days anyway.....thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | Ezpro90 -
Brand Name URL Redirecting to Actual URL
So we have already built a site under a parent company's URL: parentcompany.com And now we have their branded product lines in directories: parentcompany.com/brand-name1, and parentcompany.com/brand-name2 We also own the actual URL Brand Name 1 (which is also the exact description of the product): brandname1.com We do not yet own the URL for Brand Name 2 (which is also the exact description of the product): brandname2.com. This is because a squatter is sitting on it and is asking $10,000+ for it. What we are trying to determine is how valuable these brand name URLs are since they will be redirecting and not the actual site's primary domain name. Anybody know how much of an effect owning those and redirecting has on ranking for those brand names that are also very descriptive of the products? Would we be smarter to spend $10,000 on adwords or 10,000 on the domain? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | grayloon1 -
Duplicate content issue with dynamically generated url
Hi, For those who have followed my previous question, I have a similar one regarding dynamically generated urls. From this page http://www.selectcaribbean.com/listing.html the user can make a selection according to various criteria. 6 results are presented and then the user can go to the next page. I know I should probably rewrite url's such as these: http://www.selectcaribbean.com/listing.html?pageNo=1&selType=&selCity=&selPrice=&selBeds=&selTrad=&selMod=&selOcean= but since all the results presented are basically generated on the fly for the convenience of the user, I am afraid google my consider this as an attempt to generate more pages as there are pages for each individual listing. What is my solution for this? Nofollow these pages? Block them thru robots txt?
On-Page Optimization | | multilang0