Since fresh content is important when it comes to your day-to-day SEO, the value of updating old content is essential to the well-being of your rankings.
July witnessed the announcement by Google announced that the roll out of Panda 4.2 has been deployed and shall be updating over the next couple of months. This is the first refresh in the last 10 months of the much hated algorithm update that’s responsible for the “content is king” quote that’s been scaring the search industry for a couple of years now.
This has come as a breath of fresh air for anyone who has been hit last September and has worked to repair their low-quality content. But with every update, the doubts are always putting some webmasters in a lot of panic thinking they’ll be on the losing side of upgrade.
But you can always witness somebody crying it all out on social media or forums that he or they’ve been hit and penalized. These webmasters need to think first and act after, but also need to realize that creating irrelevant, pointless or spam content just for getting a link in the search results is never the best approach. What is the point of wasting your energy in creating such content when you could write something that can really improve your presence in the market
Focus on the Panda update but don’t forget that keyword-stuffed and low-quality content is not the only reason why webmasters get a little disturbed around the Panda updates.
Even if you are pretty certain that your content is of good quality, it makes you pause and question all the content you own on your site. Maybe you missed something, is it perfect? What will Google think? What will Google find on my site that he doesn’t like? Nobody can evaluate their site’s content regularly, it’s a known fact that this is unlikely to happen.
However, if you start evaluating you content, you will most certainly find content that is outdated, dead, expired, name how you want it, but it’s not actual anymore. This content is old or outdated but at one point was useful to your users but may not be helpful any more or the news may have evolved in another direction. This happens particularly on review websites of online gambling portals, where promotions expire and new one come in to play, but you have already published that promotion to your websites content.
Depending on how much of content you have, you might even notice the slowing down your site, causing Google to crawl and index these “less important pages” rather than focusing on your more important content.
This can happen in many cases, since you are drawn to focus on creating new fresh content and you forget about the content you created a year (or longer) ago. Blog posts or articles get moved off the home page and are not latest anymore, tweets stop going out, links stop coming in. So what do you do with this outdated content?
Since new content is necessary, but sometimes takes more time to create it than it does to update and optimize something old. That old content is probably still ranking really well, but the information is outdated — promotions have changed, maybe ownership has been change, new information has been presented, or there’s a better way to explaining your point of view.
This means optimizing your outdated content, however keep in mind that you need to be careful about it.
Don’t create new ULS’s as many of the webmaster would create an entirely new page to replace the outdated content to get more pages added to the index. That works as well, but updating the existing content to keep all the authority in one place is far a better idea. That URL ranks well for a reason, right? Why create a new page and start all over again(get it rank, get shares on social media, etc.)?
Add more keywords to capture new traffic. The way user search changes every day, so it’s likely they’re searching new keywords but wanting the same information they been served in the past, but maybe with a bit of update.
It is a good time to analyze and optimize your call-to-action. Updating your content to be better for your users and perform better in search engines gives you the time to think through what you want people to do after they’ve read your casino or sports betting review. Does the gambling site offer a new promotion? Do you have a newly implemented email database users can opt in? New portals to promote? The key is figuring out how to turn that passive reader into an active member or new player in your lead strategy.
However, there is no way around it, the option of deleting that content is the only way.
A lot of your content can be updated and optimized, but there’s some content that you just can’t keep on your site anymore. What can you do with these? Well, you can create 301 redirects for them to make the most out of your chosen content.
In most cases, a 301 redirect is going to be your best choice for content that needs to be deleted. Choose the blog post that has the most page views or better rankings and redirect the duplicate to it.
There are plenty more ways to use your outdated content to better your user experience and improve your rankings without being penalised by Google, but remember don’t forget to create new content to update your old content.
