Image via istockphoto
Written by Eric Gockel
Occasionally we have clients who want to resurrect older blog posts or bring more attention to popular ones that have slipped back a few pages.
One thing you shouldn’t do is create another, new, post with the same content. This will most likely ding you with search engines, either for having duplicate content or taking link juice from your older, original post.
Nor should you change the post date to a newer one, as that will update the post’s permalink, depending on your settings, and potentially break any outside links you have earned.
It’s perfectly fine to go back and do edits to older posts. Here are some reasons you may want to:
- Update or remove internal links in your blog posts if you have better cross-linking opportunities or older linked posts have since been removed.
- Update visuals, photos or screenshots with newer versions.
- Update statistics or comparisons with newer data, if relevant.
After doing any updates, you might want to add a dated note at the bottom of the entry to acknowledge changes have been since the original post date.
But what if you want to highlight some older posts?
A few options here include:
- Using your CMS’ “pin to top” function, to feature a blog post as the first and top entry that won’t get pushed down by newer posts.
- Routinely having a Roundup blog post (i.e. ‘Time Capsule’ or ‘A year ago’) is a way you can highlight older posts with an excerpt and link.
- Pushing out links via your social media channels.
Then go back and see which older pages are still getting traffic, and hopefully, driving leads or conversions!