Your Old Articles Are Valuable
First of all, you need to be aware that “old” blog posts are worth it. For example, in this report on hubspot.com , they found that 92% of their leads come from their old posts. Moreover, on a site that publishes 200 posts per month and has an archive of 6000 posts, almost half of the leads (46%) come from just 30 top posts. In other words, don’t say that the past is in the past, appreciate your old posts. Your posts are your treasure, your asset. In fact, our suggestion to you is to do a good content business owner database and traffic analysis first. Which are your most successful posts? What are people searching for, what terms and words are they searching with? Which searches bring people to your pages? So, can you satisfy those people who come with a certain search, does your content meet those searches (or, does it still meet them)? And how do the answers to these questions, the numbers, change over time? This data will show you better which content you should focus on. Maybe you will see that some pages never get old as classics, but you will witness traffic loss to most of your pages over time. In order to prevent your “old” posts, which make up perhaps 90% of your content, from losing blood in this way and to protect this rich asset, making these determinations first will increase your efficiency. In summary, determine which of your posts are the most valuable, or which have the potential to gain value, and start working with them.
Iraq Out of Sight…
What makes Google Google is, of course, its successful algorithms. If Google, which focuses on finding the best page that will benefit the user the most, didn’t do this job so well, it wouldn’t be where it is today. The aspect of this that looks at you as a content manager/SEO expert/blogger is this: the moment your content loses its relevance, Google will forget about you. The pages that used to bring you to the top of the search results, attract traffic, and rank high, suddenly stop appearing in the search results.
There can be a complicated relationship between timeliness and Google ranking/traffic. Thanks to Google’s constantly improving and updating algorithms, articles that are no longer up-to-date and satisfying on a certain topic begin to fall behind in search results. In this blog post , Google clearly states that fresh content is a ranking factor. This fall from grace is especially noticeable in general topic searches. In long-tail keyword searches, or in searches directly related to old content and old terminology in your article, your article may still appear at the top. However, under a more general topic, your article will begin to fall behind in the list. Because under a broader topic, your content has fallen behind, and the agenda and main terms used have started to change.
For example, if you only mentioned PageRank and link counts in your article explaining Google’s algorithms, your page will fall behind in time in this area where many terms from RankBrain to Panda and Penguin, from content relevance score to social signal are driving the agenda. Maybe those looking for inbound link count and PageRank algorithm can still reach your page with a detailed search. But your page will lose its visibility in the general SEO agenda over time.
How to keep content fresh?
So what to do? A few hours of updating can change your rankings in a day or two, returning you to your former glory. Review the following sections of your pages in order and update if necessary:
Title: Is it an interesting and up-to-date title?
Meta Description: If there are outdated keywords, valid words that describe the subject should be entered instead.
Note: Include “Last updated date” and “What was updated?” somewhere appropriate on your page (below the title, at the bottom of the page, etc.). This will both inform users about how current the content is and reflect that you are a meticulous and well-managed site.
