Throughout the year some of you may have seen SEO tips telling us how good it is to put the year in the post title. So you may have posts with titles like this:
The best non-itchy underwear of 2017
(Or maybe not). But the important thing here is the year. We are getting close to the new year, and in a few days your post that appeared current for the whole 2017 will be outdated.
So how can you fix this? Of course, you can write another post. But there is a way to refresh your old post and make it a brand new 2018 post.
I will go through the steps you need to do to make this happen. It will include:
- How to change the post heading and permalink
- How to change the post date to make it look new
- Telling Google what you did
- Some issues you must be aware of before you do this
- And finally, a conclusion
Please read through ALL of the training before you start doing these changes, to make sure you understand everything involved. Even if it's possible to do this change, there is a chance that you will choose not to.
I'm wondering if you can use same procedure to change URL if you simply don't like the title and/or URL of old posts.
I have some pages/posts with boring headlines. Plus, I don't even have any traffic to my site yet.
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Yet, just to CONFIRM once and for all, it's actually okay to change Permalink for any page/post then, as long as you do it the RIGHT WAY as you describe, correct?
(Just want to make sure because I heard previously you should NEVER CHANGE Permalink. However, that advice never sounded totally right, since I couldn't imagine that no website has ever changed a post headline and/or URL.)
Sorry if I'm redundant, but just want to make double sure.
"301 moved permanently" is a server side command that can be used when a page/post moves (or changes name/URL) within a website.
It can also be used if you decide to close your current website and start up again under another domain. You can then repost all your old pages and posts on your new blog, with identical content, and set up 301 redirects to point form your old blog to your new blog. That requires that your old blog must be live for the redirects to work, but all visitors will be sent to the new blog.
You can see what Google says about it here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633
If you want to change the permalink or your post immediately after publishing, you can do that without a 301 redirect. If you post, and you see that your heading and permalink is not good, you can change it. Most likely you will get around to do so before Google has indexed your post, but don't wait longer than a few minutes. On live websites, indexing can happen very very fast. Here at WA, questions and blogs are indexed within a minute after posting, and on our Wordpress blogs, indexing may happen just as fast.
The technique is now mostly used if you want to change the permalink structure of your whole website. For example, if you have a structure like domain/category/date/post-title and want to change that to a more SEO-friendly domain/post-title structure, then you can restructure your whole page via 301 redirects
