URL structure for content that is updated daily

Question

A small, simple site I am working on displays a single page with the day's best offers on it. The user is able to move back and forth between previous days. Which of the following URL structures works best?

Structure 1

• /index.html -- today's best offers
• /2013-06-29.html -- yesterday's best offers, etc.

Structure 2

• /index.html -- 302 redirects to /2013-06-30.html (or whatever today is)
• /2013-06-30.html -- today's best offers
• /2013-06-29.html -- yesterday's best offers, etc.

I quite like structure 2 from the user's point of view (they can share content easily), but I am a bit concerned about updating the redirect from /index.html every single day -- would this perhaps have unintended SEO consequences?

Answer 1

A 302 redirect would be a valid way to handle the situation in this case, but it may prevent your home page ever appearing in search results (i.e. the URL for the last day a search engine crawled your site would show instead).

So I would prefer the first structure. You can have a permalink from the home page to today's URL. Depending on the content you could use a blog type layout instead and show the first part of the content, with a "read more" link that goes to the URL for today, with full content.

You could also look at using the HTML 5 History API which would let you change the URL shown in the address bar without any redirections. Although Google does execute some JavaScript I think you would be safe with that.