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
-
Changing Urls
Hi All, I have a question I hope someone can help me with. I ran a scan on a website and it has a stack of urls that are far too long. I am going through and changing the urls to shorter ones. But my question is regarding redirections. Wordpress seems to be automatically redirecting the old urls to the new ones, should i be adding a more solid 301 in as well or is the wordpress redirect enough? I ask as they dont all seem to stay redirecting Thanks in advance for the help
Technical SEO | | DaleZon2 -
Duplicate content w/ same URLs
I am getting high priority issues for our privacy & terms pages that have the same URL. Why would this show up as duplicate content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | RanvirGujral0 -
Category URL Pagination where URLs don't change between pages
Hello, I am working on an e-commerce site where there are categories with multiple pages. In order to avoid pagination issues I was thinking of using rel=next and rel=prev and cannonical tags. I noticed a site where the URL doesn't change between pages, so whether you're on page 1,2, or 3 of the same category, the URL doesn't change. Would this be a cleaner way of dealing with pagination?
Technical SEO | | whiteonlySEO0 -
Content on top-level-domain vs. content on subpage
Hello Seomoz community, I just built a new website, mainly for a single affiliate programm and it ranks really well at google. Unfortunately the merchant doesn’t like the name of my domain, that’s why I was thrown out of the affiliate program. So suppose the merchant is a computer monitor manufacturer and his name is “Digit”. The name of my domain is something like monitorsdigital.com at the moment. (It’s just an example, I don’t own this URL). The structure of my website is: 1 homepage with much content on it + a blog. The last 5 blog entries are displayed on the homepage. Because I got kicked out of the affiliate program I want to permanent redirect monitorsdigital.com to another domain. But what should the new website look like? I have two possibilities: Copy the whole monitorsdigital website to a new domain, called something like supermonitors.com. Integrate the monitorsdigital website into my existing website about different monitor manufacturers. E.g.: allmonitors.com/digit-monitors.html (that url is permitted by the merchant) What do you think is the better way? I just got the impression, that it seems to be a little easier to rank high with a top-level-domain (www.supermonitors.com) than with a subpage (www.allmonitors.com/digit-monitors.html). However the subpage can benefit from the domain authority, that was generated by other subpages. Thanks for your help and best regards MGMT
Technical SEO | | MGMT0 -
How to find original URLS after Hosting Company added canonical URLs, URL rewrites and duplicate content.
We recently changed hosting companies for our ecommerce website. The hosting company added some functionality such that duplicate content and/or mirrored pages appear in the search engines. To fix this problem, the hosting company created both canonical URLs and URL rewrites. Now, we have page A (which is the original page with all the link juice) and page B (which is the new page with no link juice or SEO value). Both pages have the same content, with different URLs. I understand that a canonical URL is the way to tell the search engines which page is the preferred page in cases of duplicate content and mirrored pages. I also understand that canonical URLs tell the search engine that page B is a copy of page A, but page A is the preferred page to index. The problem we now face is that the hosting company made page A a copy of page B, rather than the other way around. But page A is the original page with the seo value and link juice, while page B is the new page with no value. As a result, the search engines are now prioritizing the newly created page over the original one. I believe the solution is to reverse this and make it so that page B (the new page) is a copy of page A (the original page). Now, I would simply need to put the original URL as the canonical URL for the duplicate pages. The problem is, with all the rewrites and changes in functionality, I no longer know which URLs have the backlinks that are creating this SEO value. I figure if I can find the back links to the original page, then I can find out the original web address of the original pages. My question is, how can I search for back links on the web in such a way that I can figure out the URL that all of these back links are pointing to in order to make that URL the canonical URL for all the new, duplicate pages.
Technical SEO | | CABLES0 -
Canonical URL Issue
Hi Everyone, I'm fairly new here and I've been browsing around for a good answer for an issue that is driving me nuts here. I tried to put the canonical url for my website and on the first 5 or 6 pages I added the following script SEOMoz reported that there was a problem with it. I spoke to another friend and he said that it looks like it's right and there is nothing wrong but still I get the same error. For the URL http://www.cacaniqueis.com.br/video-caca-niqueis.html I used the following: <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.cacaniqueis.com.br/video-caca-niqueis.html" /> Is there anything wrong with it? Many thanks in advance for the attention to my question.. 🙂 Alex
Technical SEO | | influxmedia0 -
Backslash in URL
my main URL is www.americanmusical.com, SEOMOZ shows I have a duplicate page title on www.americanmusical.com/. I have the think the backslash is causing other issues. I noticed when I first go to my site it is without the /, but if I navigate to the home page, the URL has the / in it. Any ideas on if this is a problem or how to handle it?
Technical SEO | | dianeb1520 -
I have 2 websites with the same content
Hello everyone, this is my first post here on SEOmoz and I have a questions that I cannot seem to figure out. So here is my scenario: I have 2 websites that are identical. The only difference between the 2 websites is the domain name. This was done a while back for marketing purposes, however, I am no longer needing my 2nd website. What is the best way to get rid of this second website? I still have about 1 paying customer a day convert on this 2nd website and I do not want to loose them, however, I know that I am getting penalized by the search engines because of this duplicate content. Please let me know the best way of going about this. PS: I have read about 301 redirects, canonicalizing URLs, and other methods but do not know which one to choose. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | threebiz0