Should you update in place or republish as a new URL?

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1. Does exact-match keyword in the URL still help? Barely, for ranking. Google's SEO Starter Guide says that from a ranking perspective, keywords in the domain name or URL path alone "have hardly any effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs".......
2. Does URL length actually affect ranking? Google does not list URL length as something it ranks on, and its guidance on URLs is about readability, not character counts. Its URL structure guidelines ask for readable words......
3. Should category folders appear in the URL or stay flat? Use folders when they describe how the site is really organized, and stay flat when the site has no lasting sections to describe. Google's SEO Starter Guide gives folders a......
4. Should the URL match the title, the keyword, or stay short? Build it from the topic, in a few words, and do not copy the title. The title is written to win the click and will be rewritten as you test......
5. Should you keep old URLs or redesign URL structure in a migration? Keep them unless the new structure fixes a real problem. Every URL you change needs a redirect, a recrawl and a period while Google moves its signals to the new......
6. Should your sitemap include every URL or only the important ones? Include every URL you want Google to crawl and show in search, and leave out the rest. That is not the same as "only the important ones": a large site......
7. What actually happens to rankings when you 301 a URL? After a 301, Google treats the redirect as a strong hint that the target URL should replace the old one in its index. Over the following crawls the old URL......
8. What happens to rankings when you change a URL slug? The page moves to a new address, and Google has to find out. Until it recrawls the old URL, sees the redirect and processes the new one, the old URL......
9. Which page’s URL survives when you consolidate, and why? As a default, the URL with more of what it has earned: links from other sites, a ranking history for the queries you care about, and traffic, weighed against how......
10. How often should you update a page before it’s pointless churn? When something real has changed, not on a schedule. An update is worth making when facts on the page are now wrong, the search has moved toward a different answer,......
11. Is a sudden drop more likely an update or a technical break, how to tell? Neither is more likely by default; the evidence decides. Line up three things: the date of the drop against Google's published update dates, your own reports for errors around that......
12. Should you act during a rolling update or wait for it to finish? Wait to judge the update's effect, and wait to make changes aimed at rankings, until the rollout has finished; do not wait to fix something that is broken. Google's core......
13. What counts as a “significant update” Google rewards vs ignores? A significant update changes what the page offers a reader: corrected or current facts, new sections that answer questions it did not, reworked explanations, new data or examples. A cosmetic......
14. What does a core update actually re-evaluate? It changes how Google's core ranking systems assess content in general, not how they treat any one site. Google's core updates page says "These changes are broad in nature, and......
15. Why does helpful content still get hit by a helpful-content update? One possible reason is that the assessment looked at more than the page. The term is historical, since Google no longer runs helpful content updates as separate launches, but the......