Fresh content is regarded as a powerful currency when it comes to search and keep your brand relevant and also help you engage with your audience’s current interests and pain points.
Updating content is important because you do not want people to find information on your website that is not valid anymore. If you have optimized your post well, chances are that people will find that post in the search engines. That was the whole point of optimizing that post in the first place. Imagine a blog that hands out SEO advice to its readers. Older posts should not contain advice that is not valid anymore. People would make terrible mistakes in their SEO strategies.
Keeping your content fresh is important for SEO reasons as well. If you rewrite an article, Google will notice changes in that particular article. If you update your content regularly, you are actually showing Google that your site is alive and up-to-date. You could either update an article with or without changing the date or you could republish the post.
But what about the appearance of freshness? What happens when a website tweaks old content or changes the date on an article from 2014 to today? What are the SEO advantages and the consequences?
Most importantly, how do you keep “evergreen content”- content that is meant to withstand the test of time-current and relevant year after year?
In this article, you will get answer to all these questions through a thorough examination of how key influencers in the SEO and digital marketing industry treat date stamps and will discuss strategy for combining outdated content
Why Might You Change the Date of the Articles? What Are the Implications of the same?
The advantage of changing the article dates is subtle and it does not obviously improve your SEO as the date listed in your SERP meta description won’t inherently impact your article freshness.
Instead, what data manipulation does is appeal to user bias. Users are naturally drawn to the most current, up-to-date information, and there is a good chance that a user who sees a cabin listing from 2012 and another from 2017 in their SERPs will click the most recent result.
Will Changing Article Dates Anyhow Impact Your SEO Negatively?
While changing dates in article snippets seemed like a shortcut to higher CTR, it leaves one wondering about the potential future ramifications. After all, just because data manipulation is not currently penalized does not it won’t be in the future.
How Do You Safely Keep Your Content Fresh?
Keeping your content fresh has little to do with the date on your article, at least as far as google is concerned.
There are several factors that affect the freshness, including the:
- Frequency of your updates
- Amount of content changed
- Rate of new link growth
The date an article is published is only one of these factors.
In other words, what really matters is the quality additions you have made to an existing page.
There are three major strategies for breathing fresh life into your old content, and all of them hinge on one simple principle that is your content needs to be timeless, relevant and valuable.
Tips to Safely Keep Old Content Fresh
- Use the Same URL but Refresh the Date
The most common strategy you will see is to add even more value to posts that were proven top performers. Typically, you do this either by supplementing the article’s original publication date with a “last updated” date stamp or an updated date beneath it.
- Add Live Updates to a Single Page
Another strategy that has been gaining steam in recent years is to publish news as it happens by updating a single page with live coverage. On these pages, you will typically time stamp each new entry as you post them.
Live updating a single page and time stamping each new addition to the page is also one of the methods llyes recommended to slegg- in addition to adding an updated date to old contents.
- Create New Landing Pages with Distinct URLs
When you find a blog post that is needed an update and you can see that is performed well in the past, it is always recommended to create a new landing page altogether. That means creating a new URL that shares some of the same content with extra added value for users.
It specifies to Google that the new pages URL is canonical to avoid posting duplicate content. A crucial final step is to support the new page in social media.
Conclusion
As a general overview, it is always recommended to not change article dates. But, naturally the oath you choose is up to you, no-matter which strategy you choose, you require to remember that not every article is with updating.
The best types of content to breathe more life into are those that are evergreen or content that is just as relevant now as it was when you first published it. The content should also be detailed enough to have resonated with your audience when it was first published and there should be enough new, helpful information about that topic to add new value without derailing your original articles subject.
And, just as you would with any other new article, do not forget to encourage new social shares. Use social media to tell your users that you have updated your content and actively engage with them through social media and your comments section to keep them interested in your update. That is why the best method to ensure your content stays fresh.