One SEO professional asked John Mueller about new content pages and how they should be updating them.
So their question is: if they have a content project that is updated daily, for example, such as the rates of cryptocurrency or something, what is the best way to do it?
Should we create a new article daily, including new URLs? They were curious about what John would recommend in this scenario.
John explained that he would try to determine whether you’re creating something entirely new, or just updating something existing – such as updating prices.
If you’re updating prices, then you don’t need to make a new page for every price change that you make. You just update those prices on the existing page.
On the other hand, if you’re providing new information, then this feels like something that should live on a separate URL, where people can go directly to that specific page of information.
The advantage of keeping the same URL is that over time, it builds a little bit more value. And then people understand that this is actually the place to go for this piece of information.
For example, if every day for a new price you create a new page, then if people search for something like – what is the current price for this product – then they’re going to find some of these, but it’s going to be unclear to Google which one of them they should show.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional
Yes. Hi, John. I brought you two questions today. The first is, if I have a content project that is updated daily, for example, like the rates of cryptocurrency or something similar, what is the best way to do it? Is it to create a new article every day, so also a new URL, or is it to update the existing article daily, so the URL stays the same? What would you recommend?
John
I guess I would try to figure out if you’re creating something new, or if you’re just updating something existing. Like, if you have a page where you’re just updating the prices, then you don’t need to make a new page for every price change that you make, you just update those prices. On the other hand, if you’re providing new information, then that feels like something that should live on a separate URL, where people can go directly to that specific piece of information.
The advantage also of keeping the same URL is that over time, it builds a little bit more value. And then people understand that this is actually the place to go for this piece of information. So for example, if for every day for a new price, you create a new page, then if people search for, like, what is the current price for this product, then they’re going to find some of these, but it’s going to be unclear to us which one of them they should show. On the other hand, if you have one page where you just update the current price, then we know for the price, this is the page. So that’s kind of how I would look at it there.
SEO Professional
Okay, so when I would do it like this, would you recommend to, force indexing also manually for this? Or do you think it will get crawled by Google over time?
John
It? I think it should get picked up automatically anyway. Usually, if you rely on using the Submit to Indexing in Search Console, to me, that’s almost a sign that, like, Google isn’t convinced about your website yet anyway. So even if you were to force it into the index, then it’s not a guarantee that it’ll actually be shown in a visible place. So I think it’s fine to use that in the beginning to kind of get started. And if you have really critical updates, to use it then. But for kind of the natural updates on a website, that shouldn’t be something that you have to use.
SEO Professional
Okay, but do you think it’s necessary, this one URL, which is daily updated to also update the article date? Should that be necessary?
John
I mean, if you’re changing something significant on the page, yeah.
Source: Brian Harnish, Mar 14, 2022
