A date in your title or URL tells humans and search engines that your content is fresh. But the moment you stop updating that content, the same date starts working against you.

Your post might cover the topic better than anything else out there. You still struggle to rank. There's a fix.

There's a second version of this problem, too. Some people spin up a brand new page every time they refresh the content: same article, new URL, new date in the slug. Unless you have a real reason to keep the old versions around, all you're doing is splitting your own equity across multiple pages.

There's a fix for that as well. Let's get into it.

Determine the Scope of the Problem

First you need to find every page where a date is doing real work in the title or the URL.

Set up a Policy rule in Siteimprove.ai that flags every page whose title contains a year. Use one rule per year you want to catch, or ask Siteimprove Support to set up a single pattern rule that covers them all. That surfaces the posts where the year is baked into how the page presents itself.

Not using Siteimprove.ai? A site:yourdomain.com intitle:[year] search gets you most of the way there, one year at a time, and site:yourdomain.com inurl:[year] catches the dated URLs. Slower, but it works on any CMS.

If you turn up content that hasn't been touched since last century, you've got a bigger problem than this article solves.

Track These Pages

You found the pages. Now you need somewhere to keep them so you can revisit them on a regular cadence.

If you used a Policy rule to find them, you already have that list. Policies re-check the site with every crawl, so the matches stay current without you maintaining them. A spreadsheet or a CMS tag works just as well if that's what you've got.

Whatever you use, the point is the same: this is a living list, not a one-time cleanup. Anything new you publish with a date in the title belongs on it too. A policy picks those up at the next crawl; a spreadsheet needs you to add them. That's how you stop the problem from growing back.

Adjust Your Standard Operating Procedure

Beyond adding new dated content to your list, there's one more change to make.

Before you publish anything with a date in the title, edit the URL to strip the date out. Most CMSs let you edit the slug before publishing, so do it then. Changing it afterward means setting up a redirect.

The idea is that you update this one page as the years go by. No special historical need? Then you're not creating a new page every time.

This one change stops the cycle. From here on you update a single page, changing the title and the content to keep it current.

Now let's fix the pages you already have.

Update Your Existing Pages

Work the list. Go through each page and:

  • Update the page title
  • Update any references so they reflect current information
  • Check the page in Siteimprove.ai's Quality Assurance for broken links and misspellings before you republish
  • DON'T change the URL. More on that in a second.

If you have several pages on the same topic with different years in the URL, update the most recent one. The rest get redirected.

Redirecting Existing Pages

A redirect is an instruction that tells the web server to serve the new URL whenever someone asks for the old one. It preserves nearly all the equity the page built up over its life. On a practical level, it also keeps visitors and search engines from hitting a 404 when a page moves and the old link breaks.

Very convenient. But I've learned over the years that using redirects indiscriminately causes its own problems down the road.

The worst is the redirect chain: one page redirects to another, which redirects to another, and so on. It gets messy fast, so we're not going there.

So when should you use a redirect?

When you have multiple pages on the same topic with different years in the title or URL, redirect them all to the single most current page.

When is a redirect optional?

If you only have one page with an old date in the URL, just update the content and the title. You don't need to spin up a fresh date-free page. Here's why:

  • Search engines evaluate the content for freshness, not the URL.
  • Almost nobody reads the full dated URL, and when they do, the updated title is what stands out visually.
  • Changing the URL moves the needle very little; there are better things to spend that effort on.
  • Leaving it alone is simpler (though you could argue it's six of one, half a dozen of the other).

How do you create a redirect?

That depends on your CMS. On WordPress there are plenty of plugins, and they all work roughly the same way: you give them the old URL and the new one.

In some setups you only enter the part of the URL that identifies the post, not the whole address, because the plugin already knows which subdomain it's redirecting within. Since a redirect can point anywhere, the destination URL needs to be complete.

Before you redirect, do this:

  • Update the most recent page.
  • Copy its URL into your notepad. You'll need it in a minute.
  • Remove the date from the URL and publish the post.

Then:

  • Open your redirect plugin and enter the old URL from your notepad alongside the new, date-free one.
  • Point any other dated pages at this new URL, then delete those old pages.

Takeaways

Stale content struggles to rank even when it covers the subject well, and freshness matters for AI search too. Update the content, update the title, and when several dated URLs cover the same thing, redirect them to the one current page. One lone dated URL? Updating the content is usually enough on its own.