How to Revive Expired Content

Most bloggers don’t like the idea of their content expiring, especially if they publish a lot of it on a consistent basis. The thing is that the more you publish, the less time you have to review your past articles. And sorry to be the one to break this to you, but your content won’t stay evergreen till the end of time.

Well okay, if you publish articles on learning the Latin language then you’re safe, but for any other niche, things change quite fast. And if you’re in web technology, blogging, or making money then your content is like a bottle of freshly squeezed carrot juice in the fridge … so to speak.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that good, quality content has a short lifespan.

Essentially, content is like food. The better it is, the sooner you have to eat it.

If you’re starting to think that some of your content is getting near to its expiration date, yet you still see it as a valuable asset for your blog, you have no other choice than to bring it back to life.

First of all, why would you even want to do this? Well, it’s a lot easier to revive a piece of old content than to create a completely new one and build up its position to reach the same level of popularity and search engine recognition.

Check the information

The core information itself is a great starting point. With time, it’s the core of your content that’s most likely to expire first.

For instance, if you have a post on how to build a WordPress theme then you should update it every time a new version of WordPress comes out. If you haven’t gotten back to the post for over a year then it’s surely expired by now.

If you’re in a completely different niche then the story is very similar. You should still keep your finger on the pulse and take notice of every significant change that’s going on around you.

The point here is to make sure that your content is still true and describes the factual state of things.

If it’s not the case, you’ll lose your search engine spot very quickly. Which brings me to…

Check the keywords

Besides the core information, the keywords grow old too. And it’s not like your content stops being optimized for your selected keywords. This is about the keywords themselves being no longer attractive from an SEO point of view.

For instance, (the most graphic example I can come up with) if you’ve targeted a keyword like “business ideas 2012” then you can be sure that it’s almost expired by now. Changing it to “business ideas 2013” (and updating the content, obviously) is therefore a great idea.

Now, tuning the keywords a bit requires some modifications to be made in the body of your content itself. You need to use the new keywords a couple of times inside the content, so Google can notice the change.

Of course, coming up with new keywords from thin air isn’t the best approach for this. You should always do proper keyword research and select the keywords that are both valuable and not that difficult to rank for.

Review your personal opinions

I don’t know if you’ve ever experience such a situation, but sometimes I find my old posts not in-tune with my current point of view.

Having popular content on your blog that you don’t agree with isn’t the most optimal scenario. Especially if people are still commenting on it.

If it’s possible, change the content to reflect your current opinions. If it’s not possible (due to the nature of the article; in case any change would ruin the article) then either swallow your pride or write a short disclaimer at the end explaining the current situation (preferably also write a new post about it and link to it).

Add something new

This isn’t only about making your content relevant again, but about making it even better than it was before.

Try to look for places for improvement and for new elements you can include to make the content better. Maybe there’s a new product that helps people with a given issue, or a new method that’s worth mentioning.

Whatever your niche is, I’m sure you can find some information that can be added to benefit your readers even more.

Update your SEO campaign

Since now you have some new keywords, it would also be a good idea to re-launch your SEO campaign.

SEO doesn’t have a good PR these days. With updates like the Penguin, Panda, and other creatures introduced by Google, the game of SEO is getting tougher by the day.

However, if we just remain calm then we can still improve our rankings and get more visitors.

Due to the recent changes, I won’t give you any exact advice on what to do here. Instead, I send you over to an SEO blog of your choosing as they are probably the most up-do-date guys around.

Give it new life on social media

This sounds like a big deal, but what I actually mean is to simply tweet about your revived content, mention it on Facebook, Pinterest, and on whatever other platforms you’re using.

See Also
YouTube features for Content Creators

Depending on the size of your fallowing this may just be enough.

Also, I encourage you to use a plugin like Tweet Old Post, which takes care of sending out promotional tweets about your past content on autopilot, no supervision required.

Interlink with other content

Internal links are probably just as important as backlinks pointing to your content, yet they are a lot easier to acquire, for obvious reasons.

Simply go through your new content and search for places where you can include a link to your revived content. This will guide Google’s attention back towards the post and force it to re-crawl it.

Also, this way you’re guiding your visitors’ attention towards the post. If you’ve managed to make it up-to-date again, they will probably write some new comments and spread the word through their social media profiles.

Write new guest posts

Apart from writing you should also link to your revived content from within these guest posts.

If you do a good job at this, you can see many new visitors to your site.

The best approach here is to carefully choose the blogs where you’re going to guest post. The more relevant the topic of the blog is to the topic of your (revived) content, the better.

Besides, guest posts are a great strategy for a lot more reasons than just reviving your old content. Guest blogging is probably the most effective promotional method for blogs of today.

Do you have any experience reviving your content? Is there anything else worth doing? Feel free to share your opinion.

About The Author

Karol K. is a freelance blogger and writer. Currently, he’s all about providing blogging advice to real estate business owners, and getting the word out about Fort Worth real estate.

 

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