Refreshing old blog content with dates in the URL

[Your_Workshop]

In today's Whiteboard Friday (Keyword Targeting, Density, and Cannibalization), Rands makes a comment about updating content on pages that have dated URLs and states:

"If I were advising him on SEO, I'd urge him to maintain a single page called "Best Seattle Coffee" or "Best Seattle Espresso" and update that annually (changing the title to 2012, 2013, 2014, etc but leaving the URL the same). I'd also urge him to take the prior year's content and put that on a new URL like "/coffee-from-2012" (or the like)."

1. What are the opinions from an SEO perspective to update pages that have dates in the URL to reflect new content? Does this confuse the search engines if they see one date in the URL but another in the page copy?
2. If this content is from a blog and they are listed / displayed based on chronological order, this fresh content would be buried. Obviously internal links and other ways to promote the content would be beneficial but Is it a bad UX to move this page to the top of the "list" when it clearly has an older date associated with this fresh content?

[Your_Workshop]

Thanks, Jane! This is a very valid option, though in the current website architecture coupled with client expectations that could be difficult. I will keep this in mind but am open to other thoughts if anyone has any.

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

It would be much trickier to do this with blog content given that it is naturally archived in a chronological way, unlike static web pages which can be updated with new dates. If you found you had a selection of blog posts that you wanted to update like this, I'd say you needed to turn these into static articles first and use the method Rand suggests going forward. Obviously that would require new URLs and redirects.