Anyone who owns and maintains a website eventually has to deal with outdated blogs or pages that have content that is no longer accurate or relevant. This may cause issues with your business if a potential customer believes you offer a service you no longer do, or have a product that’s no longer in production, etc. So what are your options when it comes to old, outdated content? The new gold standard in content marketing is evergreen content. This simply means content that is always relevant and is never outdated. So the goal to keep any website ranking is to ensure it has as much evergreen content as possible, whether that means the content is continually updated or just simply written in a way or is general enough to never be outdated. With that in mind, the following are a few options when it comes to managing your outdated blogs and content while maintaining your traffic and pagerank.
1. Update the Content Where it is
Assuming that the quality of the updated content is high and is still relevant to the search terms it is pulling traffic for, this may be the best option. This will allow you to keep the traffic, and provide the user with the updated information they are looking for.
2. Set up a 301 Redirect to an Updated Article
If you really want to start fresh with a new article, whether that content is now completely outdated or the design of the previous blog needed to be updated, a 301 redirect to an new article may be your best bet. However, while a redirect retains much of the old post’s pagerank, it may hurt you in the rankings slightly.
3. Leave it as is and Link it to an Updated Article
If you’re worried about losing potential traffic and pagerank for that page, you can always leave it as is and simply add a line of text at the top of the article stating that the blog or content is no longer up to date, with a link to the updated article. This allows for the least amount of disruption to pagerank and optimization but does not provide the same level of user experience that options 1 and 2 provide. This could possibly increase your bounce rate, and is probably best used as a stopgap, not a long term solution.
Have another question about content marketing? Contact New Wine Digital today for more information.
Images used under creative commons license – commercial use (11/7/2017) Jason Tester Guerrilla Futures (Flickr)