After publishing a post most people make the mistake of simply letting it go to be forgotten in your large archive which usually no one reads.
These posts are great resources to refer to when you publish new posts and because of this you should maximize the value of them. Beneath you will find my thoughts on how you can improve your old posts.
Why Update Old Blog Posts?
Here are some reasons to why you would like to update your posts.
1. New Facts – Even though something may seem black and white while writing a post, new events may occur and new facts will be revealed. Because of this you may sometimes want to update your posts with new information.
2. Change of Opinion– This is similar to new facts, but a bit more personal. Before writing a post you may have a strong opinion on something but thanks to a helpful comment you change your mind. After doing so you may want to enlighten your visitors about it.
3. Usefulness – Internet is a big graveyard. There are hundred of sites closing down each day and because of this some of your links will eventually be broken. With broken links your posts quickly loses value.
4. Add Value With New Posts – Depending on how many posts you publish each month you will eventually build an archive with interesting content. By updating your old posts you can lead the visitors to your new posts as well while getting more pageviews at the same time.
Things to Update in Old Posts
These are not rules as much as suggestions on what I usually update.
1. Quick Fixes – Skim through your old content and look for broken links, spelling errors or grammatical mistakes. With more experience we will find more mistakes in our own writing.
2. Add New Information – A new fact may be revealed or you can feel the urge to update simply because you have learned more within the specific area. Personally I think it is better to update an old post than publish a completely new one with the exact same concept and a few minor changes.
3. Link to New Posts – While updating your old posts, think about what you have done since this specific post. Are there any new content within your site you can link to? By doing so you will not only increase the pageviews but also increase a page link power.
4. Reposting it – If you play your cards right your blog will grow at a tremendous speed resulting in a lot of new readers never getting to see your quality posts the first time. After updating a post your can change the publish date for tomorrow and all of your readers will get the chance to read your high quality content once more.
5. Promote – This is actually more on how you can use your old posts. If you run out of content to publish you can simply gather links to some of your old posts and present it in a new way. For example, 13 methods to get backlinks from forums.
How Often Should You Update?
This is a highly individual question and it depends mostly on what type of posts you write and how many. Personally I always try to spend one hour each Sunday updating my olds posts before revisiting comments.
Share Your Thoughts
Now I would like to hear your opinion on updating old posts. Do you spend time doing it or do you think it is a waste of time? If you update your old posts, how often and what changes do you do?
{ 3 trackbacks }
{ 39 comments… read them below or add one }
I like the tip of spending one hour on sunday to revisit old blog posts. I’ll try it. Thanks for another great tip Stefan!
Spending one hour each Sunday is something you can do with everything. By scheduling things like these you will get through them without getting bored.
My site is only a few months old, but already I see that the stuff that goes off the front page is never seen again. I also like the idea of revisiting the old posts at a planned time each week. We also might want to spend time going through them and finding ways to link to old posts from the new posts. That way when people are reading the new posts, they will hopefully follow the links to the old posts and stay in the blog for quite a while.
Reviving old post this way is good if you want to get a little rest from writing. Also, your qualification for updating old post is necessary to maintain its credibility.
yep I agree. that is one thing that I always do since everything changes and well its just the fact that there are tons to do with old posts…
I agree with you Melvin. Do you update anything more than the things I mentioned above?
Returning to my old blog posts has been on my mind for more than a year but finding time, well that’s been a problem, so I guess it comes do to making the time to go over them.
This is the first year I have been able to get away on weekends due to health issues so I have been taking the weekends off but the summer is coming to a quick close and fishing will end soon plus my backyard garden is going to be gone shortly.
The guy on the radio said we could even get frost tonight. Last night it went down to just 6 degrees away from freezing, it may have been lower out of town.
I quess I will have to use Sundays or Saturdays to do a bit or a lot of updating to older posts. Thanks for the tips.
Personally I think everyone has time if they just take time to figuring out what they really want and create a task list. By doing so you will be able to work constantly while you have fun, instead of watching TV to get away from those boring tasks.
I agree that an old post doesn’t need to be old. You can link back to an old post from a new post and I bet you that for most of your readers that post is going to feel like new.
Exactly Asswass. If you just continue to keep your information up to date it will also be useful for those who have read it once already.
I was thinking about this a few days ago. I think that I’m going to ‘repost’ (but not really) some of my old posts that were really popular. It will be a newer (and better) version of the post that is more helpful.
It is a truly a great method to get some attention for your old content. Good luck.
Stefan I’m loving the way you are doing back linking here..
Though republishing old post is a great idea..but I’m still wondering..is there any SEO replication of changing the blog posts…??
Search engines love when you update your old pages and keep it up to date. This is simply because they do not want old unrelevant information to rank high on their results.
I have, sort of, paid attention to some of my old posts. And most of them get visited by; new visitors who come to the site and start reading everything; visitors who search for something on search engines and end up on my site; or visitors who click on backlinks from other blogs.
So, not that I disagree with you, I just kind of think of it as they update themselves if you have promoted them enough.
Well, one of the reasons to why I like to update them is because I want to attract those visitors who enter through search engines. If they find a post with old information they will probably leave right away, but if you keep your content updated and link to new posts there is a chance they will continue to read more of your posts and in the end hopefully subscribe.
That’s interesting one.
“New Facts and Usefulness” is what I love here.
Yeah eevrything can be recycled even old post. I am bookmarking this page so I can go back for those days I need quick tips in blogging.
Thanks Stefan for sharing.
Michael
To be honest , i never update by old posts. Updated one or two with the visitor complaints that download link not working and all.
But its a good point and should follow mandatory to check and make the old ones upto date.
Thanks for reminding this important thing Stefan.
The plugin Broken Link Checker is a great plugin to check broken links automatically.
Stefan you have mention the best tips to get old stuff in new way, but I think it can harm PR.
I am not sure if I follow you. Why would it harm Pagerank?
this is great advice. I do indeed update some of my older posts but do not do it as much as I should. I will take some time this weekend to go back and take a look at what I can update. BTW, I am going to include this post tomorrow in my “Sunday’s Best” series.
Thank you Dan, I am glad you liked it. I will link back to everyone who mentioned me this month when I publish my monthly roundup, including you.
Beautiful tips man! I like it.
It happens that people start ignoring their old posts and concentrate on new posts. But giving proper treatment to old posts can also show way to good traffic.
Exactly. Do you update your old posts to benefit from it?
This opens my eyes to a very good point, I typically get annoyed when I have an article that I wrote that I thought would really do well and it tanked because of the post title or whatever else.
I am going to reuse a few of these bad boys and re-work them a little bit and see if I can get some bang for my buck.
P.s I really like the look of your Thesis Theme here, I see a lot that all look way too much alike, this is a nice change up.
It sounds like a good idea John. For some reason a post could be great but because of different reason the right people did not notice it. This could be because of wrong title, wrong day, etc. By republishing an updated version you will double your chances of getting people to notice it.
I’m glad you like my Theme. Unfortunately it still looks a bit to much like the standard theme but as usual I spend most of my time developing other sites than my own.
I totally agree with all the benefits you have highlighted here to get the most out of your old posts. This is specially true when you face that “horrifying” writers block, when you just simply do not know what to write. When something like this happens, I tend to go back and look at those older posts that specially needs updating. Great tips and If I may, you should use IIS SEO Toolkit form Microsoft to hunt for broken links. It works great and it save a lot of time, particularly if you have a big blog and several hundreds if not thousands of links to fix.
Never thought about it like that but I agree with you DiTesco. When you have nothing new to publish you can simply update your old post and republish it.
About checking broken links then. I personally recommend the plugin “Broken Link Checker” which automatically search through your posts every 72 hour to find broken links and notify you about them. Highly recommended.
To be frank my pageview has decreased drastically over few weeks. Even the bounce rate has increased upto alarming 60%. I was inactive for the past week. Any suggestion will be much appreciated
Interesting question Ricky. I have a few bullet points on this and will try to publish a post as soon as possible.
hmm, I think I will look back at my blog, maybe I can do something about it or update the post huhu nice..
nice post man and the idea for adding new information and reposting the post is awesome so that your prev post come again at front for new readers also.
Very good points Stefan. I definitely wrote a few posts when we started our MMO blog that I thought were really good, but most people never read them as we were getting little to no traffic the first couple of weeks. I am definitely going to think about republishing them or at least linking to them in future posts. Thanks!
Thank you Doug. Unfortunately I think this applies to almost every blog. Most of us publish some of our best content in the beginning simply because we have been thinking about the content for so long when we start a new blog. Since I have only been active internationally for two months I have not read your first posts for an example, so I am looking forward to see them be republished.
I revisit old posts now and then to add new links or info which I have found out recently. I don’t do it as often as I should, but I do try my best.
Some nice points you mentioned here.
BTW, I have added this to my Monday roundup post.
As always I really appreciate it George. Will drop by later today and leave a comment when your post end up in my Google Reader. Until then, thank you.
Good idea, but I must admit I’m not entirely convinced. Personally, if there is some new information that comes to light on the subject, I’ll write a new post discussing it. I find this is a better way, as it goes further in to detail, and you can be sure visitors will read it because it’s the latest post.
Still, nicely written post. Nice one Stefan!