Should you update old blog posts?
If you've been blogging for a few years, chances are there's content buried in your website that you haven't looked at since the day you hit publish. Some of it might still be perfectly useful. Some might mention services you no longer offer, link to pages that don't exist or give advice that was absolutely right in 2022 and considerably less right now.
So, should you be going back and updating it? Yes, when there's a good reason to.
The age of an article isn't the problem; its usefulness is.
Some subjects barely change; a good explanation of what a website sitemap is, for example, could remain useful for years with relatively minor updates.
Other subjects move much faster. Articles covering SEO practices, software features, legislation, statistics, prices or digital platforms need more attention because the information itself changes. We see this in our own industry all the time. That's a much better reason to update an article than simply noticing it was published three years ago.
Look for opportunities to make something genuinely better
When we review older content, we're not looking for sentences we can tweak just so the page has a recent modified date. We're looking for things that would make the article more useful in the here and now.
That might mean updating an outdated example, replacing an old stat, adding something we've learned since the original was posted or expanding an answer that wasn't particularly thorough first time around. It might also be as simple as fixing broken links or pointing readers towards newer, more relevant content elsewhere on the website.
Your business will have changed too. If you wrote an article before launching a new service, developing more expertise in an area or completing a particularly relevant project, you may now have something much more useful to add and this is all what we mean by genuine updates.
Don't change the date and call it optimisation
Google's own people-first content guidance specifically questions whether site owners are changing page dates to make content seem fresh when it hasn't substantially changed. If an article has been meaningfully reviewed and updated, making that clear to readers can be useful. Changing a date while leaving essentially the same article underneath it isn't.
Don't automatically delete content that isn't bringing in traffic either
The opposite approach can be just as unhelpful.
An article doesn't necessarily need to generate thousands of visits to justify its existence. It might answer a very specific question for a smaller audience, support another page on the website or be genuinely useful during a client or sales conversation.
Before deleting older articles you think might be outdated, look at the wider picture and don’t judge by the stats. Is the subject still relevant? Does the page receive search impressions or visits? Are other pages linking to it? Sometimes deletion is the right answer, sometimes the article simply needs a little work…
Use older articles to strengthen newer content
One of the easiest improvements is also one of the most overlooked: internal linking.
As your website grows, you'll naturally add news services now and again, case studies and articles that didn't exist when an older one was originally published. Going back and re-writing or adding to these, gives you the opportunity to internally link these topics and articles.
Those connections help people explore the subject further and help search engines understand how related content across your website fits together.
Make content reviews part of looking after your website
We’re not saying every Friday, re-write an article from your back catalog…
Simply a periodic review of the content that matters most is enough for many businesses. Start with articles that receive search traffic, cover commercially important subjects or contain information that's likely to change.
Then ask a few simple questions: Is it still accurate? Is it still useful? Do we know more now? Is there somewhere more relevant we should be sending the reader next?
If it's still doing its job, leave it alone. If you can genuinely make it better, update it.
