Can Renaming Pages and Moving Content Create Duplicate Issue?

[bobbarnes]

Hi All,

I've almost finished re-vamping my site and have added some new pages
for the latest version of the product I review.

For example I currently have an internal page:

http://www.example.com/widget-review.html

Now, I really want the latest version of the widget to be on this URL and so this page will have brand new content with the old version moved to something like:

http://www.example.com/widget-review-old-version.html

When the site gets crawled G will find a new page with the same content as an existing page in the index.

There will not be any duplication on the site but I'm still concerned
I might be penalized?

-Bob

PS I suppose another option would be to have:

http://www.example.com/widget-review-new-version.html
and
http://www.example.com/widget-review-old-version.html
with a 301 to the latter from widget-review.html

[aakk9999]

In principle you would have duplicate content only for a very short time, until Google crawls the new page (with old content) and the old page (with new content). BTW, there is no duplicate content penalty, only duplicate content filter.

However, there are number of things to consider before you decide on strategy:

- Would you regularly review a new widget and move the current review into another "old review" page(s) or is this "one off"?

- Are the widgets similar enough so that the links that you (may) have got for the current widget-review.html still be relevant if you replace the content and review the latest widget on that page?

- Is your current widget-review.html page currently ranking well explicitly for that widget? Or is it ranking for that "kind of widget" so the ranking may not be greatly changed if you change the review - providing you are careful how to word a new review?

[bobbarnes]

It might be helpful here to reveal a bit more on the nature of the widget - hopefully this is ok.

The widget is a car - just the one model. So it's fairly rare for a new mark to come out - say every 4-5 years.

Therefore, yes all inbound links will still be very relavent.

Most visitors come in via the landing page and one of the main search terms is "widget review". The keywords in the new "widget-review.html" will be very similar to the old content so I wouldn't have thought the ranking would be changed very much on that basis.

FTR, I've got more pages to change using the same principle such as image galleries eg http://www.example.com/widget-images.html

[jimbeetle]

I do this quite often and have never had a problem (that I noticed at least).

Using your examples I would move the "old" content from widget-review.html to widget-review-old (in my case I use a date, e.g., widget-review-2005.html), then put the current content on the widget-review.html page as I'm a very big fan of reusing pages in order to age URLs. The only links I throw to the "old" page are from the "current" page and an html site map.

By far the most important thing to do is ensure that the title element and meta description element are as unique as you can make them, as this is Google's first sniff test to see if the pages are indeed different.

[bobbarnes]

Going over the meta titles, descriptions and keywords is the final job.
I've been caught out on this in the past and pay a lot of attention to this aspect of optimisation.

[aakk9999]

Well, if this is the same model of the car, just a review of a newer version, then your content would be pretty relevant to links, so you could put the current content on the separate URL, and put a new review about the latest mark on the review page. You may expect some fluctuation in ranking though as your page content will obviously be different, in the same way as you may experience fluctuation in ranking if you just rewrite your current page.

I would personally also put a link to the "old" review somewhere on the new review page to help visitors who have bookmarked old review and are in fact looking for a previous mark review.