I'm updating content that is out of date. What is the best way to handle if I want to keep old content as well?
-
So here is the situation.
I'm working on a site that offers "Best Of" Top 10 list type content. They have a list that ranks very well but is out of date.
They'd like to create a new list for 2014, but have the old list exist. Ideally the new list would replace the old list in search results.
Here's what I'm thinking, but let me know if you think theres a better way to handle this:
-
Put a "View New List" banner on the old page
-
Make sure all internal links point to the new page
-
Rel=canonical tag on the old list pointing to the new list
Does this seem like a reasonable way to handle this?
-
-
Thanks Anthony, thats a great solution..
-
You could handle this similar to how you'd handle any sort of seasonal/yearly content.
Ideally, I'd try to have this set-up.
domain.com/top-10-list is your main piece of content. This is the page that currently ranks well. I would update that URL with your new, updated content. The content that was originally on that list, I would put on a new URL like domain.com/top-10-list/2011 or whatever year the original article was created. Then, on the primary page, I would link to all previous/archive lists. You could update the page every year to keep it fresh.
This would keep all rankings/authority focused on your original URL. If your original URL doesn't work with this plan, for instance if it was domain.com/2011-top-10-list, I would consider 301ing that to a newly created page that is focused on being an evergreen list.
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
-
Same language, Different countries. What would be the best way to introduce it?
Hello, We have a .com magento store with the US geo targeting We're going to launch a different versions soon, one for the US, and another one for Canada (we're going to add a Spanish and French versions later as well) The stores content will be same, except currency and contact us page. What would be a better strategy to introduce it to Google? What is better URL structure? example.com/ca/ , example.com/en-ca/ , or ca.example.com/ ? Should we stay with the original www.example.com/ (example.com) and just close an access to /ca/ and /us/ / or use rel=canonical / or use "alternate" hreflang to avoid duplicate content issues? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Meditinc.com0 -
Website with only a portion being 'mobile friendly' -- what to tell Google?
I have a website for desktop that does a lot of things, and have converted part of it do show pages in a mobile friendly format based on the users device. Not responsive design, but actual diff code with different formatting by mobile vs desktop--but each still share the same page url name. Google allows this approach. The mobile-friendly part of the site is not as extensive as desktop, so there are pages that apply to the desktop but not for mobile. So the functionality is limited some for mobile devices, and therefore some pages should only be indexed for desktop users. How should that page be handled for Google crawlers? If it is given a 404 not found for their mobile bot will Google properly still crawl it for the desktop, or will Google see that the url was flagged as 'not found' and not crawl it for the desktop? I asked a similar question yest, but it was not stated clearly. Thanks,Ted
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Keeping E Commerce Product Content Fresh
Hi, Some months ago we created unique content for each of our product descriptions - basically, we removed manufacturers description and made our own unique content. But our content is now, I feel, stale but I'm trying to work out how we can produce fresh content for the product pages and how much is needed for Google to notice the changes? My question is: What does google class as freshness? Would a new photo count? I've always thought that it has to be mainly text content but we do not get that many reviews as our products are not mainstream and it's a small market so are we to create extra bits of text content in the descriptions, and how much?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Duplicate content when changing a site's URL due to algorithm penalty
Greetings A client was hit by penguin 2.1, my guess is that this was due to linkbuilding using directories. Google webmaster tools has detected about 117 links to the site and they are all from directories. Furthermore, the anchor texts are a bit too "perfect" to be natural, so I guess this two factors have earned the client's site an algorithm penalty (no manual penalty warning has been received in GWT). I have started to clean some of the backlinks, on Oct the 11th. Some of the webmasters I asked complied with my request to eliminate backlinks, some didn´t, I disavowed the links from the later. I saw some improvements on mid october for the most important KW (see graph) but ever since then the rankings have been falling steadily. I'm thinking about giving up on the domain name and just migrating the site to a new URL. So FINALLY MY QUESTION IS: if I migrate this 6-page site to a new URL, should I change the content completely ? I mean, if I just copy paste the content of the curent site into a new URL I will incur in dpolicate content, correct?. Is there some of the content I can copy ? or should I just start from scratch? Cheers hRggeNE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Masoko-T0 -
Moving some content to a new domain - best practices to avoid duplicate content?
Hi We are setting up a new domain to focus on a specific product and want to use some of the content from the original domain on the new site and remove it from the original. The content is appropriate for the new domain and will be irrelevant for the original domain and we want to avoid creating completely new content. There will be a link between the two domains. What is the best practice for this to avoid duplicate content and a potential Panda penalty?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Citybase0 -
Best way to set up anchor text on parked pages?
Our company is no longer offering a series of products, much to the disappointment of our SEO team since we've spent a long time building up the pages and getting them ranked organically. The pages all have decent page rank and in some cases rank #1 for the primary keyword. We have a sister company that we acquired a year ago and they still offer these products on their website. They are a completely separate company with their own website which existed long before we acquired them and we have nothing to do with their website. Our team has proposed that rather than take down the URLs on our site for the products we no longer offer, to put a message saying something like "sorry we don't offer this anymore but you may be interested in this.." and then link to our sister company with anchor text so that they can get some benefit from our SEO efforts if we can't. The question/issue is how should we do that since there will be a lot of pages from the same domain, about 20 pages, all linking to a few pages on a different domain. Should the anchor text be varied unbranded or branded? On the one hand I think if we change up the anchor text used to link to another page many times from a single domain that looks strange and transparent to google. On the other hand unbranded text would be the better descriptor for users since we are deep linking to the product not the homepage of the other site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edu-SEO0 -
What's the best way to manage content that is shared on two sites and keep both sites in search results?
I manage two sites that share some content. Currently we do not use a cross-domain canonical URL and allow both sites to be fully indexed. For business reasons, we want both sites to appear in results and need both to accumulate PR and other SEO/Social metrics. How can I manage the threat of duplicate content and still make sure business needs are met?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BostonWright0 -
How Long Before a URL is 'Too Long'
Hello Mozzers, Two of the sites I manage are currently in the process of merging into one site and as a result, many of the URLs are changing. Nevertheless (and I've shared this with my team), I was under the impression that after a certain point, Google starts to discount the validity of URLs that are too long. With that, if I were to have a URL that was structured as follows, would that be considered 'too long' if I'm trying to get the content indexed highly within Google? Here's an example: yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/article and in some cases, it can go as deep as: yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/organization/article. Albeit there is no current way for me to shorten these URLs is there anything I can do to make sure the content residing on a similar path is still eligible to rank highly on Google? How would I go about achieving this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NiallSmith0