Updating content on URL or new URL
-
High Mozzers,
We are an event organisation. Every year we produce like 350 events. All the events are on our website.
A lot of these events are held every year. So i have an URL like
So what would you do. This URL has some inbound links, some social mentions and so on. SO if the event will be held again in 2013. Would it be better to update the content on this URL or create a new one.
I would keep this URL and update it because of the linkvalue and it is allready indexed and ranking for the desired keyword for that event.
Cheers,
Ruud
-
no we use hyphens. Just for the example. And thanks for your answer. I think 3.1 would be an good idea.
I thought just replacing the content would be good because then you refresh your content. You do not lose your link love and the event content would be very similar. We do not really want to rank for the old content. We want a visitor to come to the event page and register for the event.
Have to think about it a little while
-
While I'm here, do you not have hyphens as word separators in your URLs or is it just for these examples that you're not putting them in?
i.e. Why have you gone for www.domainname.nl/eventname2013 vs www.domainname.nl/event-name-2013?
-
Tough one these annual events, few paths you may want to consider.
**1) Create a new url - www.domainname.nl/event-name-2013 **
Reasonable idea if the event is searched by year i.e. they'll search "event name 2013". As you probably can't be sure about what people are going to do I'd suggest not relying on that and keeping the original URL. Make sure and link to all future years from here though (link to 2013, 2014 when it comes, etc.)
PROS - You'll now have a naming convention and never have to worry about this problem again You don't need to worry about what to do with last year's info You build up your site's relevancy for the term with multiple pages on the same topic
CONS - You lose any authority and link equity the main page has built up If the pages are highly similar you may have trouble ranking the newer ones (or older ones, I dunno how Google works it out)
2) Replace it - Simply put up the new content for 2013 and overwrite the 2012 content.
Not great for a number of reasons. Significantly changing the content may lose some of your relevancy and the archived content may still have value to users.
PROS - You get to keep the same URL and it will always be the most recent information (if you update it) You get to keep your authority and link equity (caveat: If the content changes entirely search engines may strongly devalue previous links to that page)
CONS - You lose content You may lose relevancy
3) You update the content with 2013's schedule and place the older content on a new page - http://www.domainname.nl/event-name-2012
This way you can keep working on the existing URL but don't lose the old content.
PROS - You build up your site's relevancy for the term with multiple pages on the same topic
CONS - You may confuse search engines by moving the content they expected to another page
3.1) Canonicalise the 2012 content
As above but you add a canonical tag to the 'archived' page telling search engines that the main page is the one they're looking for
PROS - Users still have access to the older content
CONS - The old content no longer counts for much
4) You add the new content to the main page and keep 2012's underneath
You could simply update the page with a
<header>
combo in HTML5 or demote the previous year's to
s and use
for this year. You can even somewhat hide the 2012 stuff by using css, jquery or js (maybe ajax, I dunno), that would mean that the page can still pretty much look like you want.
PROS - Adding more relevant content to a page can improve the pages quality All content accessible from one location for the user
CONS - If it is year specific you may dilute the relevancy Shouldn't be seen as hiding content, but if there's a lot of keyword heavy text in the hidden divs it may trigger sore sort of alert
What would I do? Depends on the event/type of site I guess. Most likely 3.1 or 4 but as I'm not 100% happy with what canonicalisation does, probably 4.
If anybody wants to jump in with other ideas or other pros and cons there's probably a lot I've not thought about.
</header>
-
No problem my friend and thanks for the explanation. If you are going to repeat the event then there is no point in creating a new page for it. You can just add the new event to the same page mentioned under a different year. So the point is, the URL should not change but the page gets updated with the new event's info. This is very good from SEO standpoint also as the page will be constantly updated with new content and you will still enjoy all the link love that it accumulated over a period of time.
Hope this helps.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Hi Rafi, that is correct what you are saying. But every event has its own page. The question is, if we repeat this event. What would you do. Create a new event page or update the old event page of that event.
Like we would have www.domainname.nl/searchlove (wish we had that event)
And we are going to repeat searchlove in 2013. Would you put all the new data of searchlove 2013 on www.domainname.nl/searchlove or would you create a new url www.domainame.nl/searchlove2013
Sorry if the question was or is a bit difficult to understand (it mainly because of my English)
-
Hi Ruud,
Straight into the meat. If you start adding all the events to the same page, then it would dilute the page's ranking capability as it would have to rank for multiple events (event names) and this is not recommended. So, the best thing for you to do would be, come up with individual even pages and let them rank for the specific event name. Doing this, you will not only be ranking well with even specific pages but also, the size of the website will also grow which is very good for your website going forward as the search engines like big websites with lot of unique content and there are better chances for big sites to become authoritative in the niche when compared to their smaller peers. Hope you got the point.
Good luck.
Regards,
Devanur Rafi.
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
-
Old Content Pages
Hello we run a large sports website. Since 2009 we have been doing game previews for most games every day for all the major sports..IE NFL, CFB, NBA, MLB etc.. Most of these previews generate traffic for 1-2 days leading up to or day of the event. After that there is minimal if any traffic and over the years almost nothing to the old previews. If you do a search for any of these each time the same matchup happens Google will update its rankings and filter out any old matchups/previews with new ones. So our question is what would you do with all this old content? Is it worth just keeping? Google Indexes a majority of it? Should we prune some of the old articles? The other option we thought of and its not really practical is to create event pages where we reuse a post each time the teams meet but if there was some sort of benefit we could do it.
Technical SEO | | dueces0 -
URL Structure
I'm going through the process of redesigning our website, and the URL structure was brought up. We currently have our URLs structured as domain.com/keyword. It seems that some people think setting your URLs up to look like: domain.com/directory/keyword makes more sense from a user's perspective, and from a search engine's perspective. With our directories labeled as services, solutions, clients - I see no value in adding directories as it dilutes the keyword and brings the keyword further away from the domain. Are there situations where adding a directory before the page in the URL makes sense? If anyone has data showing the difference between the two that'd be great! Thanks, Brian
Technical SEO | | PrasoonGoel0 -
Duplicate Content Issues
We have some "?src=" tag in some URL's which are treated as duplicate content in the crawl diagnostics errors? For example, xyz.com?src=abc and xyz.com?src=def are considered to be duplicate content url's. My objective is to make my campaign free of these crawl errors. First of all i would like to know why these url's are considered to have duplicate content. And what's the best solution to get rid of this?
Technical SEO | | RodrigoVaca0 -
How to protect against duplicate content?
I just discovered that my company's 'dev website' (which mirrors our actual website, but which is where we add content before we put new content to our actual website) is being indexed by Google. My first thought is that I should add a rel=canonical tag to the actual website, so that Google knows that this duplicate content from the dev site is to be ignored. Is that the right move? Are there other things I should do? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | williammarlow0 -
Canonical URL Issue
Hi Everyone, I'm fairly new here and I've been browsing around for a good answer for an issue that is driving me nuts here. I tried to put the canonical url for my website and on the first 5 or 6 pages I added the following script SEOMoz reported that there was a problem with it. I spoke to another friend and he said that it looks like it's right and there is nothing wrong but still I get the same error. For the URL http://www.cacaniqueis.com.br/video-caca-niqueis.html I used the following: <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.cacaniqueis.com.br/video-caca-niqueis.html" /> Is there anything wrong with it? Many thanks in advance for the attention to my question.. 🙂 Alex
Technical SEO | | influxmedia0 -
Tags and Duplicate Content
Just wondering - for a lot of our sites we use tags as a way of re-grouping articles / news / blogs so all of the info on say 'government grants' can be found on one page. These /tag pages often come up with duplicate content errors, is it a big issue, how can we minimnise that?
Technical SEO | | salemtas0 -
Shorter URLs
Hi Is there a real value in having the keywords in the URL structure? we could use the URL: Mybrand.com/software/tablets/ipad/supertrader.html Or instead have the CMS create the shorter version mybrand.com/supertrader.html and just optimize this page for the keyword 'supertrader ipad software'
Technical SEO | | FXDD1 -
Google inconsistent in display of meta content vs page content?
Our e-comm site includes more than 250 brand pages - lrg image, some fluffy text, maybe a video, links to categories for that brand, etc. In many cases, Google publishes our page title and description in their search results. However, in some cases, Google instead publishes our H1 and the aforementioned fluffy page content. We want our page content to read well, be descriptive of the brand and appropriate for the audience. We want our meta titles and descriptions brief and likely to attract CTR from qualified shoppers. I'm finding this difficult to manage when Google pulls from two different areas inconsistently. So my question... Is there a way to ensure Google only utilizes our title/desc for our listings?
Technical SEO | | websurfer0