Rewriting the year on an article or just make new one?

Hello,

I have a bunch of 'Top lists' that rank for KW's like "best 2016 list". Should I change the date to 2018 or should I just get another article that has 2018? If I did that would it possibly be penalized for duplicate content?

Update the year, I've seen many do that. But only if the 2016 searches are low volume. 2018 should get you more traffic. And after you update it, throw it in addurl to index instantly so it can start ranking for '2018'.

xxaxle said:

Hello,

I have a bunch of 'Top lists' that rank for KW's like "best 2016 list". Should I change the date to 2018 or should I just get another article that has 2018? If I did that would it possibly be penalized for duplicate content?

Click to expand...

Yes, the content will be duplicate if you just change the year and keep the content same on the new page. You can update the existing page with the only update or adding updated information. Please don't make the huge change at once. It will hurt your ranking.

You can check and follow backlinko.com, how Brian Dean updates existing pages with updated information.
For example check pages Brian updated pages regularly

https://backlinko.com/link-building
https://backlinko.com/17-untapped-backlink-sources
https://backlinko.com/on-page-seo
https://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique

a

wblteam said:

Yes, the content will be duplicate if you just change the year and keep the content same on the new page. You can update the existing page with the only update or adding updated information. Please don't make the huge change at once. It will hurt your ranking.

You can check and follow backlinko.com, how Brian Dean updates existing pages with updated information.
For example check pages Brian updated pages regularly

https://backlinko.com/link-building
https://backlinko.com/17-untapped-backlink-sources
https://backlinko.com/on-page-seo
https://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique

Click to expand...

Awesome, thanks for your help!

I would rewrite the article. Change some things up so it is not seen as duplicate content.

Unless it's one of very few terms where people are going to search for things from previous years ("best films of 2010," "election results 2004," etc.), change the year on the existing article.

As others have mentioned, yes, creating a new article that is verbatim identically except for the year will generally cause issues with getting the content indexed due to duplicate content issues.

More importantly, creating a new article at a new URL and keeping the old one live is a waste of whatever backlinks you have pointed at the page for the previous year. If you write a new article at a new URL and leave the old one unchanged, your new page would be starting over (basically) in terms of link building. Those old links would now be pointed at a page optimized for an outdated term that no one is searching for anymore (despite what keyword research tools may tell you; they can take a while to update from a previous year's data).

I would go for getting a 2018 article. But always remember that duplicate content is a big no-no. You can always rewrite and follow best SEO practices.

Leah

wblteam said:

You can check and follow backlinko.com, how Brian Dean updates existing pages with updated information.
For example check pages Brian updated pages regularly

Click to expand...

Was literally about to link backlinko's article on content updating/relaunching. It's definitely better to slightly update and continuously relaunch your old content.

Only need to edit the year if you don't have new unique content. Don't complicate your situation