Will Older And Outdated Articles Hurt My SEO? Read more.

Google cares just as much about the value of the content that you created years ago as it does about that new article you’re about to publish.

Revitalising old content can boost your website rankings.  So can taking outdated content off your website. Deleting outdated content can also enhance user experience as well as boost your brand’s reputation by ensuring content is as accurate as possible.

Reconsidering Your Content Marketing Approach

The process all starts with auditing as well as evaluating your content.

There are essentially three buckets of content:

1. Content which assists you.
2. Content that really does nothing for you.
3. Content which can hurt you.

The primary step in the process is to crawl your content.

Some options which you can use to crawl your content include the following:

• Screamingfrog
• DeepCrawl
• Oncrawl
• Sitebulb
• Botify

After you get through the crawling process, it is vital that you know about the following elements:

• Title: Is it optimised? Does it include a reader benefit?
• URL: Is it SEO friendly? Do you need to make changes to it?
• Author: Who wrote it? Is it an expert/authority in a specific field?
• Publication date: Is the content still fresh or out of date?
• Number of reads: The more reads that the content gets, the better. It’s a sign of good content which connected with your audience
• Word count: It isn’t essentially a sign of low-quality content but it could possibly indicate quality issues.
• Number of links: How many inbound – as well as internal – links do you have?

So, What Should You Do About Old Articles?

The answer to how you should treat old articles really does depend on what type of old articles they are as well as what type of value they add to your users.

A news site, for instance, may want to keep all these old articles live as there is value in historical news searches. While the editors of the news site may want to keep them live, they may not link to them very much or prioritise them. Most crucially, they keep the date published so that users know that they’re possibly outdated articles.

A non-news site, such as a company blog, SEO-themed site, or topical site could decide that there isn’t much value in their older articles for users. If this is the case, the best alternative is to either update the article to something more relevant that will interest users and rank or to simply remove it.

Checking, updating, structuring as well as deleting old content needs to be part of a process. Just as you need to clean up your kitchen closet every now and then, it is necessary that you clean up your old content. As your website grows, you need to clean out the content as well as maintain the structure. This really needs to be an essential element in every SEO strategy.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you want to master SEO then you need to do our SEO and Web Analytics Course. Follow this link to find out more.