It’s time to update your guide from one year to the next, but your guide has earned some stellar SEO credibility and you don’t want to risk losing that. In this resource we will walk you through how to update your guides from year-to-year without impacting your SEO negatively and actually leveraging with SERP ranking of previous guides.
** IMPORTANT NOTE **
The previous recommendation had been to create daisy chains between guides from one year to the next, however as our sites have gotten older this practice has been antiquated and actually causing a string of too many redirects. Think of it this way, your 2018 Holiday Guide actually goes to your 2019 Holiday Guide, which directs to your 2020 Holiday Guide… you get the picture now! It’s a little messy for Google to determine what content you ACTUALLY want your reader to view.
Best Practices For Updating Your Guides + Resources
To update your guides for the current year, we actually recommend using a URL that DOES NOT have the year in it. This allows you to build SERP Rankings* for an evergreen URL and prevent the need to redirect and/or daisy chain each year.
Should you create a new guide or update the existing guide?
This would depend on the “type” of guide.
An evergreen guide for example can be updated in real time as listings get updated or new content becomes available. These would be guides like your Photographers Guide or a resource that serves more as a directory and are not specific to a particular year.
For timely guides, i.e. 2022 Fall Activities Guide, our recommendation would be to build out the new guide as a ghost post, meaning you DON’T PUBLISH IT and keep it in DRAFT mode only. When it comes time to launch the new guide, you would copy the page code from the TEXT tab of the post editor and replace the existing guide with the new page code. Then be sure to update the Publish Date and essentially Re-Launch the guide with updated information and publish date.
What should you do with old daisy chains?
It will be important to go back through old daisy chains and update them to redirect to the most recent guide URL. Example, rather than your 2018 Holiday Guide redirecting to your 2019 Holiday Guide, you would update the redirect to point your 2018 Holiday Guide to your 2021 (or current year) Holiday Guide. You’d repeat this for all redirect of the Holiday Guide.
Now this won’t be necessary going forward since we will be building guides on evergreen URLs going forward.
*What are SERP Rankings?
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. It is the webpage a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo shows a user when they type a search query. The search engines aim to fill the SERP with relevant results that help the user find what they are looking for.
For example, if a user searches for “best stroller for toddlers”, the search engine will show a list of results from around the web that talk about strollers for toddlers in a helpful way.
The goal of the search engine is to get the searcher as efficiently as possible to the solution or answer to their query. The SERP is the vehicle for them to do that.
Questions?
Royally confused?! No problem. Simply fill out a tech ticket and we are happy to help walk you through the process!