Thread

Hi folks,

Right now I’m busy with a project, but I’ve run into a little snag. It’s nothing technical, but logical… What I’m trying to figure out is how to handle the following situation.

I’ve got a listing of news that is showing the entries that were posted on a single day and a add-on I’ve coded myself to navigate from day to day. The only thing that I’m having some doubts about is how to solve the very first page where there is no date specified in the URL… Should I show the most recent day, or should I redirect the visitor to the URL with the most recent day in it.

To illustrate my point, a little example: (* marks a specific page)

* /news/
- /news/2010/06/11/
- /news/2010/06/07/
- /news/2010/05/30/

But when news is added on a new day, the URL of the first page is changed from /news/ to /news/2010/06/12/.

- /news/
* /news/2010/06/12/
- /news/2010/06/11/
- /news/2010/06/07/
- /news/2010/05/30/

For a visitor it wouldn’t matter much how it’s displayed, but people who come from Google could land at /news/ even though that page doesn’t contain the news item they were looking for anymore (since Google indexed the old page that was found under that URL). It frustrates me to no end if I end up on a search result that doesn’t contain what I searched for.

So here’s my question. Should I redirect the index page (/news/) to the page containing the most recent date (/news/2010/06/12/), or should I just leave it and just show the most recent date on the index page?

Greetz,
Wouter

I think there might be a hybrid third approach here that may have some benefits under certain conditions:

1) your repeat visitors have bookmarked /news/ as the go-to destination for the latest news… in order to do this there must be a /news/ page that doesn’t redirect (or they won’t bookmark it) that has the most up to date content
2) google should be able to send people to the correct permalink page, and also avoid duplicate content issues while crawling the site (which it may not even do every day)

To get the best of both worlds here, I wonder if the canonical link tag would be appropriate here.  on the /news/ page put a

<link rel="canonical" href="/news/2010/06/12/" />

to inform google that the permanent home for this content will be found at the link specified, not /news/ itself.  However this won’t redirect the browser so your visitors can type in or bookmark the easy to remember /news/ url.