To update or not to update news URLs ?
-
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
-
I try to balance the pros and cons of updating the URL, given that both point to the same article (in the http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-says-he-wants-to-ban-search-engines?id=12345678 URL, only the articleid is used by the db to fetch the article, all text content before the ?id= is irrelevant), so it's not the issue of losing trafic.
Pro of udating is having a fresher timestamp displayed in google organic. That's for sure.
Con is the fact that google could induce from the fresher timestamp that it's a "new" article and that all its accumulated weight (referrals, social mentions...) would be lost. That's not for sure, and that's why I'm looking for advice.
Best,
Yves
-
By "... loss of referencing," what precisely do you mean? From your question it appeared you were mostly worried about the timestamp issue in web or all search on Google?
Are you worried you change the article so much that given info would no longer be in it?From a news perspective, the timestamp is informative and, I believe, important. Is there the ability to add an update to that which would show near the timestamp? So the story is three blind mice arrested for jaywalking today. Then in two days breaking news: Mouse B freed due to technicality in arrest! Is there a way to have **"Update 2016.04.01" **show in bold at beginning of article so that timestamp seen by searcher is likely ignored?
Best
-
Thanks Robert. I probably need to be more precise on one point. Both option A and option B lead to the same page, because the ?id=articleid is the only part of the URL taken into account by the db server. So we are not going to get any 404's. What I worry about is the loss of referencing linked to the original URL wording, if I may say so.
-
Thanks Eric. I probably need to be more precise on one point. Both option A and option B lead to the same page, because the ?id=articleid is the only part of the URL taken into account by the db server. So we are not going to get any 404's. What I worry about is the loss of referencing linked to the original URL wording, if I may say so.
-
Eric, in your last line did you mean to say just update the story? It sounds as if you are saying don't change the URL, update it. Just trying to give Yves clarity.
Best
-
i would definitely not change the URLs. Once a page is crawled and indexed, you should leave it there--and update that page as necessary. Other sites may link to it (and you may then lose the links or they'll to 404 errors) if you change the URL. You may also have social media links out there to the article that are shared. If someone clicks on it from social media, then it would then go to an old story if you change the URL.
Generally it's better to NOT change the URL of the page unless it's a new story, requiring a new article. If it's the same story, then you should just update the current URL.
-
Yves,
Great question and I do think you already know the answer. IMO I would not update the URLs because you could end up chasing your tail. If you change the URL are you going to 301 every time you change it? If not, anyone who linked to the article or bookmarked pre change is lost.
Anecdotally, a year or more ago I started noticing on a major sports mag online that starts with S and ends in I they were changing titles regularly. Frankly, I don't have much time for reading sports so I need to get the info and go. As a fan of the Mavericks for instance, I would read an article that was Dirk Sets Record and think great cause I like the big German. Then a day later I would see an article that was Another Record! and when I clicked on it... was the one I had already read the day before. My guess now is that they change their titles like I change my socks. When I saw your question I did a quick test and they are not changing the URLs on the two I found.
I hope this helps you a bit.
Robert
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
-
Google news rejection
Google News is always rejecting my application. I feel as if my site strongly fits the requirements yet they reject it all the time. My url is hiddentriforce.com Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | Atomicx0 -
Can't get my preferred URL, how much does it matter?
Hi guys. I'm building a new site at the moment - seen a solid SEO opportunity for my work. I'm a producer engineer, specialising in mixing and mastering, so i'm creating a site for online mixing services. After a bit of keyword research I decided that "online mixing" was the best, most relevant and high volume term to go for. Ideally i'd like my home page to be www.onlinemixing.com (or something similar) but alas! It's been taken, as well as all the variations (like switching words, hypens etc) How much does this matter form an SEO point of view? E.g - For the search term "online mixing" would - www.onlinemixing-signalchain.co.uk be much worse than -www.onlinemixing.co.uk? Or am I sweating the small stuff? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Isaac.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
Directory site with an URL structure dilemma
Hello, We run a site, which lists local businesses and tag them by their nature of business (similar to Yelp). Our problem is, that our category and sub-category(i.e.: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant or www.example.com/budapest/cars/spare-parts) pages are extremely weak, and get almost no traffic, but most of the traffic (95+ percent) goes for the actual business pages. While this might be a completely normal thing, I still would like to strengthen our category (listing) pages as well, as these should be the ones targeted by some of general keywords, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘restaurant+budapest’. One of the issues I have identified as a possible problem, that we do not have a clear hierarchy within the site, so while the main category pages are linked from the homepage (and the sub-categories from here), there is no bottom-up linking from the business pages back to the category pages, as the business page URLs look like this: www.example.com/business/onyx-restaurant-budapest. I think, that the good site- and url structure for the above would be like this: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant/hungarian/onyx-restaurant. My only issue is, perhaps not with the restaurants but with others, that some of the businesses have multiple tags, so they can be tagged i.e. as car saloon, auto repair and spare parts at the same time. Sometimes, they even have 5+ tags on them. My idea is, that I will try to identify a primary tag for all the businesses (we maintain 99 percent of them right now), and the rest of their tags would be secondary ones. I would then use canonicalization and mark the page with the primary tag in the url as the preferred one for that specific content. With this scenario, I might have several URLs with the same content (complete duplicates), but they would point to one page only as the preferred one, while our visitors could still reach the businesses in any preferred ways, so either by looking for car saloons, auto-repair or spare parts. This way, we could also have breadcrumbs on all the pages, which now we miss completely. Can this be a feasible scenario? Might it have a side-effect? Any hints on how to do it a better way? Many thanks, Andras
On-Page Optimization | | Dilbak0 -
Canonical URL Tag
Hi, I have two pages that are identical on my site: http://www.absolutepower.nl/creatine-monohydraat and http://www.absolutepower.nl/CREATINE/creatine-monohydraat Should I use the canonical URL tag in this case? Thanks, Jasper
On-Page Optimization | | Japking0 -
URL length... is >115 now >255?
I've been having detailed discussions with a CMS provider on behalf of a client. Long URLs are the least of their problems however, the developer is arguing that Google has amended their algorithm and will now read URLs that are up to 255 characters long. I have stated that as far as I am aware, Google will still not read URLs over 115 characters... Before I stamp my feet, can someone confirm what is actually happening? SEOmoz still classes URLs >115 characters long as an amber issue. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
Re-write homepage url for non EMD for SEO
Hi, A lot of talk about EMD's lately not just here but all over SEO and affiliate forums. I've dabbled in emd's but have decided to go against the grain and use a non emd. I think I can optimise hard enough to rank and at the same time build a brand, which is where most emd's fail. But my question is this: If you are targeting lets say the term 'running trainers' and the domain is runyoursocksoff.com would it be more beneficial to rewrite the root domain to this: runyoursocksoff.com/running-trainers/ It does look messy to me and more then likely I would not use this but I have seen it a few times and was wondering if its a work around for non emd's.
On-Page Optimization | | activitysuper0 -
Is having the word catalog in an ecommerce site url detrimental to seo.
IS: www.example.com/catalog/category%/product% better than www.example.com/category%/product% category and product are dynamic values that change with the diff. categ. and products displayed while catalog is constant.
On-Page Optimization | | no6thgear0 -
On page Analysis... how does seomoz choose to match a keyword to a url?
On my "On Page" analysis report it show me a couple pages that have D ratings... one key phrase is "my destination lodging" and it is matching it up with a url like mydomain.com/my-destination-hotels.html. It says I'm ranking 37th for this term.... Is it just suggesting that I optimize this url because it is already ranking for that term? So should I create a different page with a different url to better match this phrase? Thanks for any ideas.
On-Page Optimization | | PillarMarketing0