HELP: Do i need to change my website's URLs ?

iwillnbd

iwillnbd

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I created my first amazon affiliate website last year and made the mistake of adding the year in the URL of my review articles which look something like:

www.mywebsite.com/best-tv-speakers-2016/
www.mywebsite.com/best-tv-cleaners-2016/
and so on.

I've already built some backlinks to these pages and am ranking in the top 30s for some keywords.

The problem is that 2016 is over, but my URLs still have 2016 in them. I've already updated the title of these articles from 2016 to 2017.

My question is : Do i need to change the URL of these pages as well ?
 
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Why don't you remove that and focus on title optimization and good content ?
 
dhia27 said:
Why don't you remove that and focus on title optimization and good content ?
Click to expand...

Are you suggesting me to remove the '2016' part from the URL ?
 
Here's the competing views:
  • Most SEOs I've read say URL text matters a great deal. There's data to back that up, but it's all correlation data, and correlation doesn't equal causation.
  • At the last Google Webmasters Hangout, John Mu said bluntly that words in the URL don't do much to influence ranking:
  • EDIT: argh, I screwed up the YouTube timing. Go to 8:20 in the video.
That said, John Mu makes a great point: the URL is critical for users. If you rank #1, and your URL says "2016," users might be less likely to click. Based on that alone, I'd create a 301 and forward to a new URL with 2017 in it.
 
Remove the Year. You may lose your existing SEO ranking but the benefit (users are more likely to click your link because it isn't outdated) far outweighs that.
 
Definitely need to remove the 2016.

It just looks irrelevant with the old year in it.
 
Remove the year, if you use wordpress, it will usually be redirected to the new format. If not, 301 redirect old urls to new ones manually.
 
@Banditoseo made a correct point. I would do this only - create a new page and use 301 redirects.
 
Yes do 301 redirect old url to new url as it will not look like outdated for user who click it.
 
edit that permalinks by remove 2016,
and make 301 redirect from old permalinks to new one which is without 2016,
 
Create a new one, then 301 redirect the old URL to the new one. This will pass the link juice and not getting penalized of duplicate content.
 
Thanks for the input everyone!
As suggested by most of you, I've decided to drop the year part from the URLs.

Since i'm using wordpress, i'll edit the permalink of the page and remove the year.
Do i have to create a 301 manually after doing this?
 
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