Refreshing old blog content with dates in the URL
-
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)."
- 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?
- 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?
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Is image SEO worth it for e-commerce?
I have been trying to find any case studies of people who have optimized images for SEO for their e-commerce website, but haven't been able to find any case study, indicating obtained results. I am wondering how much increase in Google Image search traffic others have been able to obtain when optimizing their e-commerce images for image SEO. I need this information to justify development resources needed for for example an image sitemap, changes to file names and alt texts, title tags and possibly EXIF data. File size is already ok. Hope someone has experience with this and can share some results. Also, would be great if Moz would do a Whiteboard Friday about this 🙂 (hint!).
Whiteboard Friday | | DocdataCommerce0 -
What is the importance of anchor text in seo? And how does it relate to a ranking keyword?
i have one dilema if i put targeted keyword in the anchor text(backlink), is that how i am gonna rank for that keyword? i am new to the community. need help and lets say if thats true what will happen in these given cases? case1 site:a has 100 linking domains from 1000 backlinks and they have 100 anchor texts which are all same case 2 site:b has 100 linking domains from 1000 backlinks and they have 50 anchor texts which are all same which one will rank better?
Whiteboard Friday | | calvinkj1 -
I am looking for my "Flywheel" that can help me scale link building
I am looking to scale our link building efforts to create better inner link opportunities, according to the "flywheel" method by Rand, I need to find something that is "evergreen" and creative, What are some of the coolest campaigns you guys have seen?
Whiteboard Friday | | uBreakiFix1 -
Sentences RDF Format
Why do we need to write sentences in RDF format (subject, object predicate) is there a reason for that ? Thank you,
Whiteboard Friday | | seoanalytics0 -
Internal linking: Global Nav Bar obscuring link authority?
I was watching Rand's whiteboard on how links in the headers/footers can impact SEO: moz.com/blog/links-headers-footers-navigation-impact-seo If I understood correctly: 1) Google will use the first link in the html that it sees for a given page. Additional links will not be considered for passing weight. 2) Text links in body (carry more weight than) > image links > nav links > footer links If we want to use a global nav bar, is there a simple solution for not obscuring the links in the body content? (It seems very awkward to load the header nav last (and bring it up via css after the page loads), and this also goes against Google wanting people to load above-the-fold content quickly.) If I internally link to a page that was not important enough to get a spot in the global nav, but I include this link in the body as a text link (for example, an accessory specific to that item), is this internal link really getting more weight in Google's eyes because it wasn't in the nav? This seems strange to me. Thanks!
Whiteboard Friday | | HalfPriceBanners0 -
UX Functions for 10x Content
Hey all, I recently watched the Whiteboard Friday on Good Unique Content and had a question about how we should approach this from a User Experience perspective. If our goal is to create 10x Content (sounds great, I'm in!) isn't this going to mean that we end up with 5000 words of text in a blog post with no way for the reader to approach the content except to start at the top and work their way down? How does the user know that they've found what they want above the fold if what they want is buried in 10K words of text and images? I'm concerned that I'll need to have some kind of in-post navigation to allow users to quickly navigate to the part of the content that's most relevant to them I've tried to overcome this by creating a sort-of visual 'Table of Contents' at the top of my blog post. But I'm wondering if this is a useful feature for users or whether it will detract from the quality of the content above the fold. Has anyone else run into this challenge when trying to create 10x Content?
Whiteboard Friday | | TMHoward861 -
Content marketing: guest post around our article
Hello, We made a piece of content that is useful to several different types of organizations and websites. It's also unique. We're promoting it by appealing to the humanitarian side of things. The sites I'm looking at right now have blog posts with content that indicates that our article would be useful. How do we ask, by email or phone, site owners to write a guest post around our article? It seems like a lot to ask even though it's needed. Resources I'm using: Like the company on facebook. Follow them on twitter. Comment on recent blog posts. Share their good recent content on facebook. Retweet good recent tweets on twitter. Follow Rand's advice here: http://moz.com/blog/what-separates-a-good-outreach-email-from-a-great-one-whiteboard-friday
Whiteboard Friday | | BobGW0 -
Is submitting a single piece of video content to a lot of different video sites spam?
In the past I have been told that you can use tools like Tube Mogul to auto submit a single piece of video content to lots of different video sites and that it is not considered spam. After watching Rand's Whiteboard Friday I am more skeptical of this tactic. Here are my list of reasons why doing this would and wouldn't be considered spam. This is not spam because: These video sites are individual sites with an individual user base. This is spam because: Google does not want duplicate content of any kind in the SERPs. I leaning towards spam but have seen this be very effective in the local space. So I'm torn.
Whiteboard Friday | | anjonr0