Updating old blog posts in Wordpress to appear more recent?
-
I'm doing work for a law firm that has a lot of blog post content from 2010-2011 ranking for long-term keywords. These pages are displaying date snippets in SERPs, but because legal information can change year to year, I don't want the content to appear as though it's 2-3 years old.
The date of the post is in the URL structure, so I can't change the publication date w/o changing the URL. So my question is twofold: is there a way to show an updated date snippet in search results, or block the date snippet from showing, even if the date is in the URL?
Or are there other options - creating pages for each of these posts and 301ing them to the page that has a cleaner URL, etc.?
Thanks in advance for your help!
-
if you think you think you can add more to the topic, then just update it. If the content is very good and has been driving consistent traffic for a long time, i would make it to a static page (same permalinks) then make sure it's very visible throughout the site.
-
If I may suggest, start with stripping the date from your URLs and 301 redirect them to the updated URL.
As for your content, ensure you have headings such as "The definite guide to ..." / "The 2013 guide to ..." to signal to visitors that your content is updated. You can also try " ... (Updated Aug 2013)" in your header. Updates should be summarised and listed on the top of your posts so that visitors immediately know that your content has been regularly updated.
With that, the date snippets in SERPs will not appear to be old, and may in fact help to establish the authority of your post, since the post has been created a few years ago and has been regularly updated.
-
Hey Ron, thanks for the feedback, I'll definitely look into setting up new content that way, seems like a logical organization. I appreciate the help!
-
Mike, looking over my question, I failed to mention that I have updated all these blog posts in the last two months. So for instance, on the sitemap, it says that these certain posts were last modified in July or August.
I'm not concerned with Google - it sees the updates in the sitemap. What I am concerned with is that the user doesn't see the sitemap modifications, so to them, the content still appears a few years old, when really it's been updated recently. I've added "Updated On..." tags here and there, so I'm not trying to play any games w/ the dates, just trying to show users that these pages have been updated.
-
Dustin,
I would not try to game the system in this way as you may have unexpected side effects and actually hurt your rankings. Instead I would look at these subjects and ask the firm if there have been changes or updates relative to these posts. Where there have been changes I would suggest you evaluate the value for each post based on possible revenue if they get a client, search volume and how this positions them against their competitors. I would prioritize this updated content based on this.
I would add in a plug in that shows all the blogs on a subject and sorts them by date. This way you may be able to simply write an update blog and then refer to the previous blog (the prize you should go for is to get comments on both ). If the changes are significant enough I would write a new blog on the subject.
On all the blogs that are out of date I would have someone go in and add a comment in this regard with a reference to the update.
On the blogs that are older and not out of date I would add an amended post simply stating that the blog has been reviewed and that the information is still relevant.
This is not the only way to do things but my experience is that this more labor intensive approach that creates content is always the best approach. With this approach my clients had an average of 45% traffic growth last year while increasing their conversion rate.
Let me know if you have any additional questions,
Ron
-
For the most part, trying to re-post your old content with a newer date in order to make it seem fresh when it isn't is really just an attempt to game the system. It may work somewhat in the short-term but its not a good long-term strategy. New, unique and relevant content would always be better.
-
Hey Mike, thanks for the response. That's my strategy with most of the old content on the site. But there are a handful of posts that have some good links and age behind them and I figured it would be more effective to update those than to create a new page to replace them. I'm tracking the content I have replaced, though, so I'll be able to see if that's been effective so far.
-
Why not write new content about the same topic but from a more current viewpoint including any changes to the law and/or info on recent, publicly available cases that are related to that law?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is the Page Authority for posts in my blog so low
I have noticed that the Page Authority for my posts in my blog are all hovering around 1 and the rest of the pages on my website are around 20. The Domain Authority for my website is 16 and I think the page authority of my posts are negatively affecting my Domain Authority as I write more content. Any suggestions or recommendations as to why posts have such low Page Authority compared to similar pages. I have images, links, and great content in my posts, but they are considerably lower in Page Authority*
Technical SEO | | JoeyGedgaud0 -
Removal of date archive pages on the blog
I'm currently building a site which currently has an archive of blog posts by month/year but from a design perspective would rather not have these on the new website. Is the correct practice to 301 these to the main blog index page? Allow them to 404? Or actually to keep them after all. Many thanks in advance Andrew
Technical SEO | | AndieF0 -
Why is my blog disappearing from Google index?
My Google blogger blog is about 10 months old. In that time i have worked really hard with adding unique content, building relationships with other bloggers in the same niche, and done some inbound marketing. 2 weeks ago I updated the template to something cleaner, with a little more "wordpress" feel to it. This means i've messed about with the code a lot in these weeks, adding social buttons etc. The problem is that from some point late last week thurs/fri my pages started disappearing from Googles index. I have checked webmaster tools and have no manual actions. My link profile is pretty clean as its a new site, and i have manually checked every piece of content published for plagiarism etc. So what is going on? Did i break my blog? Or is something else amiss? Impressions are down 96% comparing Nov 1-5th to previous 5 days. site is here: http://bit.ly/174beVm Thanks for any help in advance.
Technical SEO | | Silkstream0 -
What if an old site goes into PENDINGDELETE status
Hi, I have an old domain which accidentally was set as PENDINGDELETE by the registry. It's now not resolving to any ip address any more. Actually I was relocating from the old domain to a new domain. Just one month before it become PENDINGDELETE, I have submitted a "Chang of Address" in Google Webmasters Tools as well as setup the web server to 301 redirect all urls on old domain to the new domain. I have some sub-questions for this case: 1. What will happen to the effectiveness of the "Change of Address" in Google Webmasters Tool after old domain is dropped. As a domain is deleted, I have no way to maintain the verified ownership of the it in case Google asks me to reverify. 2. Suppose during last month before it's deleted, Googlebot had crawled 50% of urls on old domains, detected the 301 redirects and save them to its index. When Googlebot crawls those 50% urls again after the old domain is deleted, as those urls are not resolving to any web server, will Googlebot retain the last 301 redirects or drop the 301 redirects as well? 3. After a domain is deleted, how soon will Google purge urls on old domain from its index? Thank you. Best regards Jack Zhao
Technical SEO | | Bull1350 -
Posting on Forums for SEO benefit
Hi Is it beneficial to participate on forums in our market place to help become an authority in Googles eyes? I assume even if we don't get links it still useful in terms of co-citation... Thanks
Technical SEO | | jj34340 -
Merged old wordpress site to new theme and have crazy amount of 4xx and duplicate content that wasn't there before?
URL is awardrealty.com We have a new website that we merged into a new wordpress theme. I just crawled the site with my seomoz crawl tool and it is showing a ridiculous amount of 4xx pages (200+) and we cant find the 4xx pages in the sitemap or within wordpress. Need some help? Am i missing something easy?
Technical SEO | | Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.0 -
How often Google Places updates?
Hi, My first question in SEOMoz :). I have just finished doing citations and optimisations for a local business. I now want to know how often Google Places update their database to look for citations etc to improve rankings? Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | TheReachers0 -
What should be noindexed on a Wordpress blog?
I know this can be a "it depends" answer so I'll try to explain. Qualifications on your answers would be great. I use the Wordpress architecture for myself and clients on sites and blogs. Almost every business site we create has a blog and I'm always working to improve results on them. My strategy has been the following: Categories: General, main content types, general keywords. Index, follow Tags: Very specific, post specific, may only be used once for one post. My categories have descriptions that are displayed on the category pages with excerpts. Tags rarely have a description but are displayed with excerpts on the page. My idea has been to index the categories to crawl the content and they have unique content by showing the category description. Tags shouldn't be archived because they may be all over the place and may have only 1 post with no tag description. I'm trying to reduce duplicate content but I don't want to limit results for my clients and myself. Should I set tags to noindex, follow or should I have them indexed? The only thing I'm thinking with having the tags indexed is that I may be able to get additional traffic through the more specific tags (i.e. tag = meta tags, category = SEO).
Technical SEO | | JaredDetroit0