Best Practices for Recurring Blog Topics

[GwenKestrel]

Our site has annual articles (such as a payment calendar and an announcement of our annual conference). Is it better to keep all the old blog articles available and searchable, redirect them to the most current year's entry, or something else entirely?

My instinct is to have a permanent redirect to the newest article.

[EGOL]

I would make a permanent page.

If you want to preserve the historic information, make a new page for it... or a new page for each year... and link to them from the permanent page.

Don't do redirects unless you have to.

[AtlasGlobal]

Being in a similar situation, I would recommend creating annual blog posts and using canonical tagging. Then, in the previous year's version, putting a link at the top to the current year.

For example:

Top 5 Crickets in 2016

Thank you so much for visiting our 2016 page. For a more up to date version see our [link] Top 5 Crickets in 2017 page.

This way you get the best of both worlds without having to put in a redirect.

[ThompsonPaul]

Canonical tag isn't likely to have the effect you want here. Search engines expect (require) that conicalised pages be essentially identical to each other or they will likely ignore the canonical "suggestion". Identical meaning essentially word for word, except for perhaps word order, like on parameter-sorted product category p[ages.

In my experience, EGOL's solution is vastly superior. Create a permanent page for each, then find all the old related blog posts and redirect them to the permanent page to harness whatever authority those pages have for the new one. That way all further authority to the same page year after year, instead of being diffused amongst many weak separate pages.

Paul