Give Your Old and Outdated Content A Second Chance

In SEO term, new and fresh contents are necessary. But as long as you keep adding new and fresh contents, you'll eventually end up with old contents that were made weeks, months or even years ago. This happens more than often, and you may wonder what should you do to with them.

One of the common issues when regarding old contents is having a "dead" content. This type of content is an old and so outdated that at one point of its life it was useful for visitors, but now it's just deem to be useless.

Depending on the size of your website and the capacity of your server, old contents can slow your site and can also cause search engines to crawl the less important pages rather than focusing on more important and new ones.

Even if you know you have good contents, you may need to evaluate them so search engines would find them worth their time. You need to regularly evaluate your contents, both the news and the old ones, to know how they can perform as expected.

Know What Visitors Want

New content is necessary. But when you have old contents that rank well, it's far easier to update and optimize them rather than creating new ones and hoping them to rank just as well. Good content takes time and resources to make, and after the piece has gone live and been promoted, it's a waste if you forget about it.

Anyone who creates content on the regular basis, knows how challenging it is to feed visitors' hunger for new and unique contents. This can be overwhelming to some that frustration happens when consistently thinking on creating new topics to appeal visitors.

One great way to put that old content to good use, while minimizing the cost and time, is to optimize it to the current needs. After all, if your old content was once successful, there's a reason for that to have happened. Optimizing old contents is like taking the advantage of what you already have.

To optimize your old contents that are ranking well and outdated, you need to once again present them with new technologies and new information.

There are many ways to accomplish the task, but you need to keep in mind that you should never create a new URL to replace outdated content in order to get more pages added to search engines' index. Old contents may have backlinks from other websites. It can also have plenty of visitors, social shares, referral traffic and referring domains. Before you can start re-purposing your content, you have to identify what content should be re-purposed. You can use your analytics software to get more data.

Not every old contents can be optimized. Some may need to be deleted because they're related to your old products/services you no longer offer, for example. Or the pages are about former executives and employee, old job postings, duplicate and similar posts, etc..

When you need to delete an old content, you should at least make sure you have 301 redirect enabled. In most cases, this can be your best option because it can point visitors that arrive to your old content to its newer counterpart. If you have too many page redirects, your site can slow down. To solve this issue, you may want to create a custom message instead. This message should show related links to the old content.

Update Content With New Information

Old contents that have old and outdated information can be refurbish. All you need is adding some new information related to the old one. You may need to delete some words, lines or paragraphs that don't fit the current needs, and add some related links to spice up the content.

Once the old content is updated with new information, you need to inform the search engines to crawl and re-index.

If your old content contains infographics, visuals or other media that were outdated, you may want to create new ones to replace them. If not, you can just delete them, or edit some of the words in the post that accompanies them.

And if your old post have their posted date visible to users, you need to add a message saying that the content has been updated with its editing date. This will ensure your visitors to better understand the content and not misguiding them with any old information that they think are new.

If the old content is highly ranked and have backlinks, especially if they're coming from respected websites, you can take this to your advantage by making the updated content a link opportunity. Reach out those who linked to your old content and mention the original post, then let them know that you've updated the content. This will ensure better interaction so promoting the content could be much easier for you.

Create New Opportunity

Old Pages - New Chances

People's need and interests do change time to time. And search engines' algorithm are updated more than often. How can you make those old and updated contents of yours so they have a once again chance to thrive?

The answer is to give them a new life and improve their ranking and visibility. Below is some of simple strategies you can do to ensure than your old but updated contents have a new hope.

  • Re-share the posts on social media networks
  • Add their links to some of your newer and related contents.
  • Avoid wrong redirects and 404 errors on all links.
  • Bump up the link or create a link on the navigation menu.
  • Optimize with current technology.
  • Make it more mobile-friendly.
  • Resubmit your website's sitemap that homes the content's link.