What not to do when adding new content to your site

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Schipul loves to repeat the ‘Content is King’ mantra.  By now you may be tired of hearing it, but it’s true!  Fresh content really is important to your search engine ranking and the way your users interact with your site and your organization. 

Everyone likes to be able to add content to their site quickly and easily – which is one of the great things about the Tendenci software.  However, some users have found that one of the fastest ways to do this is by re-activating OLD content.  Not a good thing to do.

Example – An already expired job position comes open again and instead of creating a new job and posting it, an administrator re-activates that original (old) job listing.  Don’t let this happen to you!

But why is activating old content on your Tendenci site so bad?:

  1. Dates matter to the search engines.
    You may be able to trick your human users into believing they are seeing new info, but search engines still remember the original add date and are likely to NOT score your old reactivated page.  Yikes!
  2. Dates matter to humans.
    Your users DO notice the low numbered ID for the listing. Would you rather attend an event that is number 5 or 500? Doesn’t the latter seem more alive and current?
  3. RSS!
    RSS feeds pull your site’s information based on the content’s creation date and time in the database. You may not be able to see this date information, but it is there hiding on every object. Extending an expiration date will NOT put your content back in the RSS feeds. This is by design RSS feeds are supposed to be new content. New is cool!

The moral of the story is to always add new content as new content.  Doing so will keep the search engines, your site users and your RSS feeds happy and up-to-date.  Happy content adding!