Many bloggers think of older posts as being over and done with, and are eager to move on to new posts.
As far as search engines are concerned, older posts are fair game. They’ll show up in search results the same as new posts, and continue to attract traffic. In fact, that’s one of the benefits of daily blogging, building up such a huge amount of content on your site that the traffic you attract from search engines continues to grow.
To get the maximum benefit from all this old content, you do need to give it a bit of care now and then.
Updating an old post makes search engines happy. Updated content, from a search engine perspective, is more relevant than content that wasn’t updated recently. As you continue to blog, you’ll gain in skill and knowledge, and it’s worth your time to rework some of your new insights into older posts now and then.
For example, after I’d written my How to Make Your Own Website For Free series, I found an easy way to embed graphics in posts. Since that series had, at the time, been a major source of traffic for the blog, I went and updated every post in the series with screenshots. I added value to the readers of the series, while at the same time keeping the content fresh for search engines.
Comments also count as updating the content of a post, so your visitors can help you to keep old posts fresh by commenting on them. I’ve heard some bloggers complain about getting comments on old posts, but that’s one of the ways of keeping those posts high in search engine rankings.
When you see in your traffic stats visitors hitting your site for a keyword but not getting to the post that is the best fit for that keyword, you can go back and edit the old post to be a better fit for the keyword. In that way you provide value to those visitors, ensuring they’ll arrive on the post that best answers the question they typed into the search engine.
It’s easy as a blogger to be focused on the new content and the next post you plan to write, but don’t forget to give the old posts some love now and then. Search engines will throw extra traffic your way as a result.
Another thing, updating your old post with links to current post give your readers a way to get to your newer content, this is especially helpful if their entry to your site was on the old post.
Good point Tyson, internal linking also makes search engines happier.
This is a good reminder for me to get back and do some more homework on older posts. Thanks for the useful info.
You’re welcome! With a daily posting schedule, updating old posts can be a chore to work in, but it’s well worth it. Especially if you have any affiliate links, it’s worth your time to check them now and then to make sure they still lead to a valid page, and fix them if they don’t.
I guess I should be grateful for the lack of a ‘related posts’ plugin for Blogger, then!
Having to do this manually has its advantages: It will make the content seem fresher to the search engines!
I fix typos whenever I see them. Usually, typos in a post make me feel bad. Now I’ll look at them as an opportunity to edit and refresh the search engine’s appreciation of that post. Cool!
I have seen a lot of bloggers doing this. I used your post on How to make a website for free, to build mine. I like it and it was easy to use. I also enjoyed the screenshots, they made it easier for me to know what I was suppose to do.
Great tips once again, I never thought of updating old blog posts.Also adding links to newer posts will make the search engines crawl your site deeper.Thanks a lot for these tips! (Digged and stumbled!)
Yes, adding links to older posts from newer ones is always a great idea. Good interlinking between pages makes the site seem a lot more user friendly to search engines.