We manage a huge daily news website in my small country - keeping this a bit mysterious in case competitors are reading
Our URL structure is www.companyname.com/news/categoryofnews/title-of-article?id=articleid
In this hyperreactive news world, title of articles change frequently (may be ten times a day for the main stories). The question we debate is : should we reflect the modification of the title in the URL or not ?
Example : "Trump says he wants to ban search engines" would have URL http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-says-he-wants-to-ban-search-engines?id=12345678
Later in the day the title becomes "Trump denies he suggested banning search engines". Should the URL be modified to http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-denies-he-suggested-banning-search-engines?id=12345678 (option A) or not (option B) ?
In Google News it makes no difference because of the sitemap, but in Google organic things are different.
At present (option B in place), Google apparently doesn't see that the article has been updated, and shows the initial timestamp which is visually (and presumably SEOwise) not good : our new news looks like old news. Modifiying the URL would solve that issue, but could, may be, create another one : the new URL, being considered a new article, would lose, the acquired weight of the previous one in terms of referrals, social trafic and so on. Or not ? What do you think is the best option ?
Thanks for your expertise,
Yves