When you have an evergreen story—something that will be relevant beyond the first 48 hours after publication—you can remove the date from the URL, so it will be evergreen too. Examples of evergreen content include:
- A story you plan on updating over time as more information becomes available
- A feature or report that is evergreen and not tied specifically to the day’s news
- A stream that you’ll be adding content to for the foreseeable future
Publish a new evergreen story
- To make the entire URL more evergreen, the SEO team recommends avoiding dates, years, and words in the permalink that tie the story to a particular time frame. You can still update the permalink after publication regardless of whether it’s an evergreen URL or not.
- Under the permalink, toggle the Evergreen URL setting on.
- Schedule or publish the story as you normally would.
Convert a published story to an evergreen story
If you want to make content evergreen after publication:
- Copy the story.
- Update the story to have an evergreen URL.
- If you updated the content, publish with today’s date. Otherwise, backdate the story and consider blocking it from RSS feeds.
- You may also need to request a 301 redirect for the previous version of the story. Making a redirect prevents duplicates and clarifies the preferred link for Google.
How evergreen URLs work
On regular stories, Chorus adds dates to the URLs. Using the evergreen URL toggle will remove the date. It will still have a story ID (e.g., https://www.theverge.com/16709882/best-wireless-over-ear-headphones-to-buy).
Note that in all circumstances, Chorus stories meet Google’s requirements for appearing in news-forward search features, such as the Top Stories carousel on desktop and across Google News.
Evergreen URL functionality is currently not set up for headless customers.
If you make significant updates to an evergreen story after publishing, you still have the option to update the timestamp. This will send a signal to Google to crawl for new information.