Oh really? Cleaning out your fridge helped you blog?! Right. Seriously though it did. As I was throwing out all of the holiday assorted foods, and there was alot, I began to think about my blog. I mean, there was so much junk in there, I think I may have even found Amelia Earhart hiding in there.
Now, for the blog. I have made it no secret that when I first started out, I was dumb. Yep, had no idea what the hell I was doing. Threw posts up without knowing what a link was or how to utilize anchor text…nothing. And SEO?! Ha…no clue. I thought about all my old posts while I was cleaning out the fridge and throwing away the junk.
Are Old Posts Junk?
To be honest, some are and some are not. But the truth of the matter is that some of my content needs edited. It needs updated and optimized. So I wouldn’t say my old posts are junk, but they are NOT optimized correctly and are more than likely hindering my blogs ranking or whatever we use nowadays!
And I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t want to keep junk around on my blog. I know that some blog owners prefer to leave their old posts as is, which is fine…but I want to continually try and improve the overall quality of my blog.
Benefit of Editing Old Posts
There are 3 main reasons to update your old posts. First and foremost is you want anyone visiting your archives to read accurate information. So posting a quick “update” to a post with any changed information is a huge plus.
Add to that the second reason, relevancy. Updated information helps keep you relevant and we all know search engines are returning the most relevant info on search terms. Finally, you need your post to operate correctly…meaning broken links need fixed or pages that you link too need to still work.
The Bottom Line
While some blog owners prefer not to edit old posts because they want a living record of what they have done, some of us may want to consider the idea. I firmly believe that if you started out like I did…remember clueless, then you NEED to fix the mistakes. I will be going back into my archives, selecting the posts that actually get traffic, and adding links, anchor text and doing general seo work on them.
I don’t see any harm in doing so. When this is complete, I may write up a separate post about which articles are now fabulous and I will surely tweet them!
What are your thoughts on updating old posts? What random event makes you think of your blog?
Feel free to tweet and share!
(37RMS7GN2P7E)
Nice post.It will help to upgrade blogs.
Thank you for your posting
I don’t see a problem either with updating old posts. I am actually doing it on a regular basis in my blog. I have been blogging since 2009 in blogger and I moved to self hosted WordPress only since August 2010.
So I have about a year’s posts that are old and need to be updated in many sense like- information, seo, post length etc. So I update one old post per week on a regular basis.
I don’t think there is a problem in that.
Jane.
Awesome! Have you had a problem with 404 errors after the move?
Hi Lisa, I really enjoyed this post… and the hundred others you have posted this week. I think re-purposing articles is a great idea, after all, we at one point felt strongly about whatever we were writing a out. Stretching the value is working smarter. Optimizing them correctly makes a lot of sense.
Secondly… you are far from dumb. i am sure you are in a race with Ana these days!! (that’s a compliment). I certainly am many strides behind the know-how… hence I might just have to have a look at your Link Building Tips… if that’s ok. I am also looking forward to getting in touch with your makeover fellow in the not too distant future. Best ~Jayne~
Hi Jayne:
thank you so much for your kind words. You can look over whatever you like!! 🙂 I am going to be doing some posts this next week involving some link building tips as I have not done so in awhile. I truly appreciate you putting me with Ana as I have nothing but the utmost respect for her.
As long as we keep reading and engaging, we will all be in the know how! Oh, and Paul is wonderful when it comes to website makeovers!!
All the best,
Lisa
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Brankica:
Thanks for the RT and I am looking into your previous question!! Excellent question might I add.
Lisa
I love the idea. I want to ask you about this: do you just update them and leave as is, or will you edit them and republish with new date (I heard you can change the date on your post, but not sure how, and don’t know how to edit the RSS afterward)?
Also, do you plan to write a post about the updates after i.e. every 5 edited posts, or after you finish them all?
I can’t wait to see what you dig out from your fridge….I mean blog 🙂
Hi Brankica!
I hadn;t really thought about how many I would fix and then do a post on yet. BUT!! I think I found a solution to your question about republication and RSS. There is an actual WP plug in for this called OPP.(Old Post Promoter) It only changes the timestamp on the post therefore pushing it to front page content. This way no duplicate content. It also addresses the RSS issue as well. Here is the link to check out the details of Old Post Promoter. I hope this helps and thanks for giving me something to think about.
Lisa