Watch out for when convenience and search engine optimization (SEO) best practices collide with information control. When releasing a series of product previews, your audience will often be wise to the patterns you use in releasing preview content – and they’ll take advantage of that to get additional glimpses of your news ahead of when you want to release it.
For SEO purposes, we know that it’s highly recommended to use URLs that reflect your content. So if you’re previewing new rules for the Elves faction in your wargame, you might have a URL along the lines “of rootdomain.com/wargame/elves-preview.” Then you might have “/dwarves-preview,” followed by “/humans-preview” (let’s leave the other SEO considerations aside for the moment).
We also know that it can often be efficient and convenient to create and stage a lot of content at once. For example, if you’re writing three preview articles to be released daily, you might write something at “rootdomain.com/insider/5-20-2016,” then “rootdomain.com/insider/5-21-2016,” etc. Or you might upload a lot of images, with image names like “articlename/preview1.jpg” then “/preview2.jpg” and so on – just to have them ready and convenient.
In both situations, once people see one or two items in a pattern, they’re pretty creative about figuring out the rest. For example, Privateer Press, maker of the miniatures game Warmachine, has been rolling out short fiction about its’ armies leaders throughout spring 2016, and asked people to sign up to get emailed right when the stories come out so that they could be the first to read these product previews. Yet even before most emails were out, people had figured out the URL for the next story and accessed it. They knew the pattern and followed it:
Similarly, if you’ve got tomorrow’s newsletter already uploaded and just haven’t shared the link yet, people can probably extrapolate from yesterday’s URL.
So, lots of explanation to say simply that if you’re hosting it on your site in a predictably named way, fans can track it down.
Simple solutions:
- Don’t stop optimizing your product URLs for SEO – but wait to take pages or posts live until the actual time when you’re ready for that information to get out there.
- Be thoughtful when bulk uploading images or other visual assets that you’re not ready to reveal – adjust their URLs to be less predictable.
- If something is intended to be an email exclusive (at least initially), consider requiring users to enter a simple code included in the email so that people testing URLs can’t find it in advance.
Image from USFWS, available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wildlife_Viewing_(9160100369).jpg under the CC-BY-2.0 license.
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