SEO Tips
As far as Google is concerned, keeping your content fresh has little to do with the date on your article. According to a leading SEO agency in Toronto your content freshness is influenced by many factors, including the:
- The amount of content changed.
- Frequency of updates.
- Rate of new link growth.
The date a particular content has been published falls under only one of these factors. What matters most – in other words – is the quality of the additions you’ve made to an existing page. The 3 main strategies for breathing fresh life into your old content hinge on one simple principle: your content needs to be relevant, valuable and timeless.
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Use the same URL but Refresh the Date
The most common strategy that a digital marketing agency in Toronto would use is adding more value to posts that have proven to be top performers in the past. One would typically do this by supplementing the article’s original publication date with an updated date beneath it or with a “last updated” date stamp.
What makes this strategy so effective is the fact that most humans are biased towards the ‘new’. Information can quickly become outdated in an industry that moves as quickly as SEO and digital marketing. Outdated information is bad for users and will reflect badly on your company/brand. Therefore, if you ranked #1 for a post in 2013, it makes perfect sense to update it.
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Adding Live Updates to a Single Page
Publishing news as it happens by updating a single page with live coverage is another strategy that’s been gaining steam in recent years. You’ll typically time stamp each new entry as you post them on these pages. This works best in addition to adding an updated date to old articles.
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Building New Pages from Scratch and Using Redirects
Suppose you have 3 outdated pages, and all of them could be compiled together to fully cover one topic. They might even be well-performing pages, so you don’t necessarily want to get rid of the traffic they’re bringing you. What you might want to do then, is create a single page combining the information from all 3 pages. Form one single ‘ultimate’ page that covers your topic from all angles after thorough research and updation. Subsequently, use redirects so that the people clicking on your outdated well-performing pages would instead go to your improved and new all-in-one page.
Do not forget to give your new page support from social media, and incorporate it into your link building campaigns.
Conclusion
Content that is evergreen – just as relevant today as it was when you first published it – is the best type of content to breathe more life into. The content should also have been intricately detailed to have resonated well enough with your audience when it was initially published. More importantly, there should be enough helpful, new information about the topic that adds more value to it without derailing your original article’s subject. Finally, do not forget to encourage more social shares for your new article.