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
-
Usage of keywords in URL
Hi everyone, I'm trying to optimize our website and I'm not sure what's ideal for our URL structure. We have two products: one of them is focused on B2C & the other one on B2B.
Technical SEO | | Klouwers
Our homepage is focused on the B2C product. For our B2B product, I'm not sure what's ideal. The URL for our 'homepage' of the B2B product is ourdomain.com/software. We have different target groups for our B2B software, and therefore different pages on our website. Which URL would be best to use for the keyword personal trainer software?
1. ourdomain.com/software/personal-trainer-software
2. ourdomain.com/software/personal-trainer0 -
Which URL would you choose?
1 – www.company.com/subfolder/subfolder/keyword-keyword-product (I’m able to keyword match with this url) or 2. www.company.com/subfolder/subfolder/product (no url keyword match) What would you choose? A url which is "short" but still relevant, or, a url which is more descriptive allowing “keyword” match? Be great to get your feedback guys. Many thanks Gary
Technical SEO | | GaryVictory0 -
Url rewrite subfolder
Hi, How can i rewrite example.com/example1/example2/example3 to example.com/example3 And is there tools or software that can generate url rewrite... (not a plugin) Thanks !
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
Page Content
Our site is a home to home moving listing portal. Consumers who wants to move his home fills a form so that moving companies can cote prices. We were generating listing page URL’s by using the title submitted by customer. Unfortunately we have understood by now that many customers have entered exactly same title for their listings which has caused us having hundreds of similar page title. We have corrected all the pages which had similar meta tag and duplicate page title tags. We have also inserted controls to our software to prevent generating duplicate page title tags or meta tags. But also the page content quality not very good because page content added by customer.(example: http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/detaylar/evden-eve--6001) What should I do. Please help me.
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Same URL in "Duplicate Content" and "Blocked by robots.txt"?
How can the same URL show up in Seomoz Crawl Diagnostics "Most common errors and warnings" in both the "Duplicate Content"-list and the "Blocked by robots.txt"-list? Shouldnt the latter exclude it from the first list?
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Should me URLs be uppercase or lowercase
I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of 301 redirects for me site. Should I make them Lowercase, uppercase, or does it matter? Also, do I want to be using hyphens (-), or underscores (_)? Any other tips? EX: http://www.stupid.com/golf-slippers.html OR http://www.stupid.com/Golf-Slippers.html
Technical SEO | | JustinStupid0 -
New Ecom Category
Hello, I'd like to create a new category for my store. All products will be from other categories, no new products will be added. So this is really content that is already on my site. I will add cateogry specific text in this page with unique title, etc. But the products are all already on my site.Is this duplicate content, will this be a bad move? Thanks
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Up to my you-know-what in duplicate content
Working on a forum site that has multiple versions of the URL indexed. The WWW version is a top 3 and 5 contender in the google results for the domain keyword. All versions of the forum have the same PR, but but the non-WWW version has 3,400 pages indexed in google, and the WWW has 2,100. Even worse yet, there's a completely seperate domain (PR4) that has the forum as a subdomain with 2,700 pages indexed in google. The dupe content gets completely overwhelming to think about when it comes to the PR4 domain, so I'll just ask what you think I should do with the forum. Get rid of the subdomain version, and sometimes link between two obviously related sites or get rid of the highly targeted keyword domain? Also what's better, having the targeted keyword on the front of Google with only 2,100 indexed pages or having lower rankings with 3,400 indexed pages? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Hondaspeder0