You Ask, I Answer: Keeping Old Links in Content Recycling?

In today's episode, Maria asks, would I ever need that old link? This is about a video from a couple of years ago on content recycling. Uh would I ever need that old link to have permanence online and history by changing this to an updated new link, do I lose any clout or historical SEO points if I take them away from the past and borrow them from the future? So when it comes to content recycling, um as long as you redirect the links properly, you shouldn't lose any search value. If you are keeping things on the same domain and you are just putting a 301 redirect link from your old content to your new content, um the recycled article, then any links that you have and the way search engines see the their value will simply flow through to the new target destination.

In terms of why you would want the old links, I can't really think of a reason why you'd want to hang on to uh the older URLs. Now there are some folks and I I can see the argument for this that would argue that uh dates in your URL strings are aesthetically unpleasant and there is no impact one way or the other uh with dates and URLs. I personally like them because I like to be able to group URLs uh by date to see like how a certain month or a certain year performed. Uh but that's more of an analysis thing that has no uh SEO impact one way or the other. If you don't have dates in your your URL uh your URLs, then uh when you go to refresh that article and you change the date and you've updated the content, you don't need to do any redirects because the URL has not changed.

Uh when you have the dates, obviously then you have to do some updating. Again, the only reason you'd want to maybe have some records about the dates is for tracking purposes. And even then, that's not essential. If you know that you know an article from 2014 has been refreshed in 2020, uh you don't necessarily need to try and and manipulate and consolidate that down to uh just the slug, which is the non-date part of the URL, uh, to do analysis on it. It's it's functionally like a new article.

Now, would you is this still the best way to recycle old uh blog content? I think so. Um there's something to be said for playing to the strengths of the algorithms, and in this particular case, we're talking about taking stuff that already did well by traffic purposes or by rank purposes, and essentially reinforcing it, continuing to improve it. We know that absent other features, uh longer, more in-depth, better researched content tends to do better because of the way that search engines, Google in particular, uh, views things like expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Having more credible information, having more original new content uh also serves uh the algorithms like for diverse uh fresh and relevant content.

And so is recycling your old posts in by the process of taking them, updating them, and then changing the URL still relevant? Yes. Yes, it absolutely is. In fact, there are some companies that uh have like 60 blog posts, that's it, and they just keep recycling and improving them over and over and over again. Uh backlinko does that, I believe.

Is it better than new content? It depends. It depends on uh what's happening in your field in your industry. I would be hesitant to ever say stop creating new content if for no other reason than there's actually frequently new things to to create content about. But uh if you do have winners, it's not a bad idea to keep those winners uh brushed up.

When I do it, the winners that I pick uh are the ones that have performed uh well and have high amounts of search traffic uh built into them. Uh so if you would go in Google Analytics or in Google data studio you can look at content and not only the number of uh visitors and users to that content but also the number of uh organic searches visits that came to that piece of content. Uh I like to look at that number as the ones that to to keep refreshing and the ones I refresh generally I refresh them about once a year, the top ones. So typically what I will do is I have the these shows uh during weekdays and to keep content fresh I will simply refresh a piece of content and then backdate it to the the nearest previous weekend so that it it looks like there's content on a on a regular frequent basis. But I'm not clobbering people who subscribe to my blog by having um you know two pieces of content drop on the same day.

One's enough one's more than enough. Um so you may want to do the same thing. I also like to have it be at least forty eight hours in the past so that there are some um there's some like Twitter accounts and things that will subscribe to your blog and just retweet posts blindly and that's fine. Um but again I want to make sure that if they're gonna share stuff, I want them sharing the most frequent stuff. When you backdate something and and have it set for to to be the most previous weekend, um sometimes those bots won't pick it up, right?

Uh and that's fine, because again, social media shares have no statistical relationship to search value. Uh from every test that we've done uh over huge huge data sets. There's just no correlation between the number of shares something gets and the the search rank that it has. So maybe we should do a show on that. That would actually be really interesting to look at social and search data together.

Another time. Um so that's the the answer. Um yes, keep recycling this way. You don't need the old links as you as long as you've done the the the redirects properly uh and cleanly. Uh and you can multiple redirect, like I have um a post I've updated five or six times.

Just make sure that all the old ones don't go to the next one in the chain, they all go to the most current version. You don't want to create a redirect loop that looks bad and it's a bad user experience. So just have it go from whatever the oldest version is and then the old version and the most second most recent version, all of them redirect to the current version. That'll just keep things nice and uh nice and pleasant for the user. If you have follow up questions about this, please leave them in the comments box below.

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