SEO: What to do with your old blog articles?

 Since its creation, the Google search engine has strived to “organize information and make it universally accessible”. This is good because in 2023 more than ever, most companies are implementing sometimes sophisticated content marketing strategies and are therefore producing content on an assembly line. To the point that the Internet user may have difficulty finding their way around!

To help the latter, Google therefore tries to play the role of filter and rewards pages that it considers useful, informative, relevant and credible.

However, when it comes to SEO, some old blog posts can act as a drag. This is why you need to take the time to audit your old content to know what to do with it! Let's discover together the different possibilities available to you.

1. Do not make any changes to the article

It's common for old blog posts to continue to be successful. In this case, why want to change them?

It is recommended not to make any changes to any content:

• When the information it provides is always accurate;
• When it is well positioned in search engine results and therefore attracts traffic;
• When it helps convert Internet users;
• When it allows a site to benefit from quality links or shares on social networks.

2. Update content

An old blog post can sometimes contain outdated information and a simple update of its content can make it perform well again.

Refreshing content is the preferred route when old articles are still extremely well referenced by Google, but they contain information that needs updating or their conversion rate has dropped considerably.

In practice, this update should not require a URL change. On the other hand, it involves replacing obsolete information.

3. Rewrite the content

Some old blog posts may cover relevant topics and may therefore be of interest to Internet users, but turn out to be poorly written. In this case, a rewrite of the content is necessary.

Generally, rewriting an old article concerns content that is poorly referenced and converts poorly despite the fact that it deals with themes that seem to attract Internet users.

When content is rewritten, it is essential to use a 301 redirect . This action will allow you to dedicate an optimized page to your article, something which was not the case with the page hosting the original content.

To rewrite your content, you can call on a professional and qualified editor.

4. Consolidate content

When several old articles deal with a very similar theme, they sometimes collide with each other. The good idea is often to carry out a consolidation by creating a new article which brings together the information presented in your different articles.

Content consolidation must be carried out in clearly established situations, namely:

• When several articles dealing with the same theme share low traffic;
• When it is not the most relevant article on a topic that is best ranked on Google.

Indeed, it is often relevant to create more complete content on a theme rather than distributing information between several contents. Unless such a strategy is really part of a networking logic for blog articles!

5. Delete Content

Some web project leaders are fans of content pruning . Believing that old blog articles can weigh down a site and harm its SEO, they choose to delete them.

If Google has several times admitted that the deletion of content could present SEO risks, this does not seem to scare many people, content deletions being more and more frequent.

Obviously, not just any content should be deleted. Content pruning should only concern articles that are poorly written, not very engaging, poorly referenced and include few, if any, quality links.

Our advice

You now know 5 ways to update old blog posts. It's up to you to decide whether it's better to leave them unchanged, delete them, update them, rewrite them or consolidate them.