Significantly updated an article - should I overwrite it, or 301 it?

[Sutra]

@Ryuzaki and anyone else who is familiar, what do you suggest?

A few months I ago I created a 1600 word post on a highly competitive keyword in a highly competitive niche. The article was created with the intention of getting backlinks to it, then funneling the juice to several money pages. I got about 20 links to that page, some with very high DA (though only about a 6.5 relevancy out of 10, to my site). I also have a lot of internal links pointing to the article. However, it wasn't enough to rank very well.

So I hired an SEO to beef it up. He's rewritten it to have 3600 words, have better on page SEO, long tails, etc. Also written in a way that's more likely to get links from influencers in the industry.

The original page was like "6 ways to..." and the url was domain.com/6-ways-to... The new article is "18 ways to...". I haven't posted the new article yet. Once I do post it, the guy is going to start doing outreach on it. Here are my questions:

Is it better to:

A) Post the new article using the old url? Basically, overwriting the old with the new. That means the article will be 18 ways yet the URL will say domain.com/6-ways

Or

B) Post the new article on it's own, then 301 the old URL to the new URL? If I do this, should I delete the old post and 301 it to the new post, or should I leave it posted and 301 it to the new post?

 

[stackcash]

First off, if you're hiring an "SEO" to do something like that for you - you should spend some significant time ensuring that you two are both on the same page in regards to the goal of the content, proper on-site optimization, and the intent of your demographic. Remember, just because they guy has a decent sales page and a ton of "reviews", doesn't mean he's actually good...at all.

Google loves when old content is freshened up. They WANT to see you go back and edit, update, and expand old posts.

But, you do have a little hiccup here in that the number of list items has increased, which kind of changes the title.

What I would do, personally, is simply update the existing page with the new content. Make the best / most rare list items your top 6 ways to solve the problem. Then, make the other section for "bonus ideas" - which lists the other 12. That way, you get to keep the same title / url slug and use the new content.

Just make sure you update your meta description to state "6 strategies + 12 bonus ideas" so that someone searching on Google will see that there's a ton of options for them to read.

You certainly could do the 301 idea if you really wanted. I just shy away from that sort of thing. Not because it doesn't work.... just preference.

 

[Ryuzaki]

If this is Wordpress you can change the URL right there in the post editor and it will set up a 301 for you internally. I'd probably still put it in my .htaccess though so I remembered what I was doing.

It depends on how much you care, but I do like Stackcash's idea because you'll be keeping the age of the post intact. I'm not sure if that would work with indexing a new URL even with the 301. At the top you could even put...

Last Updated: 8/3/16​

And you could continue to update that date in the future too, while making substantial enough changes (100 words or so) that Google notices it in comparison to the last indexed cache.

However, we're talking about a few months versus a few years. I'd go with what you want in terms of the URL and the 301. Shouldn't be too critical either way with that age.

 

[ddasilva]

I'd just overwrite the page, and see what happens with the rankings. If the rankings don't improve, THEN change URL structure.

 

[CCarter]

I'd keep the page's URL as is. The masses don't look at URLs like SEOs and those in online marketing do. Hell they barely look at the domains, cause if they did I would be getting calls to remove "MacKeeper" once a week.

 

[Sutra]

Thanks for your feedback everyone. Makes a lot of sense. I spoke to the guy, made sure we're on the same page with goals, etc. Will also be keeping the URL as is and just updating the content.