Laviskajoermoy
New member
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2014
- Messages
- 90
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I have a site with about four years of posts and I keep going back and forth on this. There is a group of articles that still bring steady traffic but the information in them is two or three years stale. Rewriting one properly takes roughly as long as writing something new, so it is a real trade rather than an easy win.
What I have settled into is checking which query the page actually ranks for before touching it. A few times I rewrote a post around what I assumed it was about and the traffic dropped afterwards. Turned out the page was ranking for a sub topic buried in paragraph six, and that was the paragraph I cut.
The other thing I got wrong early was changing the URL when the title changed. The redirect worked, nothing broke, but rankings took longer to settle than they should have for what was really a cosmetic edit. Now I leave the slug alone unless there is a genuine reason.
Still cannot judge when a post is past updating and should be folded into a bigger page instead. Merging looks right on paper for thin posts covering the same ground, but every time I do it something gets lost that I cannot quite account for.
How do you decide between refreshing and starting over? And do you work to any kind of schedule for this, or only when you notice traffic sliding?
What I have settled into is checking which query the page actually ranks for before touching it. A few times I rewrote a post around what I assumed it was about and the traffic dropped afterwards. Turned out the page was ranking for a sub topic buried in paragraph six, and that was the paragraph I cut.
The other thing I got wrong early was changing the URL when the title changed. The redirect worked, nothing broke, but rankings took longer to settle than they should have for what was really a cosmetic edit. Now I leave the slug alone unless there is a genuine reason.
Still cannot judge when a post is past updating and should be folded into a bigger page instead. Merging looks right on paper for thin posts covering the same ground, but every time I do it something gets lost that I cannot quite account for.
How do you decide between refreshing and starting over? And do you work to any kind of schedule for this, or only when you notice traffic sliding?
