How to avoid duplicates when URL and content changes during the course of a day?

[jmueller]

I'm currently facing the following challenge:

Newspaper industry: the content and title of some (featured) articles change a couple of times during a normal day.

The CMS is setup so each article can be found by only using it's specific id (eg. domain.tld/123). A normal article looks like this:

domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/i-am-the-topic,123

Now the article gets changed and with it the topic. It looks like this now:

domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/i-am-the-new-topic,123

I can not tell the writers that they can not change the article as they wish any more.

I could implement canonicals pointing to the short url (domain.tld/123).

I could try to change the URL's to something like domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/123. Then we would lose keywords in URL (which afaik is not that important as a ranking factor; rather as a CTR factor).

If anyone has experiences sharing them would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jan

[CMC-SD]

You can't change the title without changing the URL?

[jmueller]

Unfortunately not that easily, no. Those elements are tied together. Another field would need to be added on all systems and workflows involved. I guess it's the cleanest way to implement this functionality.. I hoped that there was a workaround - such as canonicals - that actually doesn't hurt the page.