What to do with Old Website Content
If you’re switched on when it comes to content marketing, you’ll carry out regular content maintenance to ensure you provide the best possible user experience and give people a reason to keep visiting your site. Old website content that no longer serves the purpose it once did can either be updated or deleted. So let’s find out how to do this sensibly.
Breathing New Life into Old Content
Writing quality content takes time and effort. There’s a high chance you’re extremely proud of what you’ve created. So how can you breathe new life into SEO outdated content without having to get rid of it completely? Well, there are several things you can do including:
- Updating content with new stats and facts. If you’ve written a popular article about video creation, for instance, that proved popular but is now loaded with old statistics, freshening it up with the latest data could be all that’s needed. Be sure to carefully source up-to-date facts and incorporate them into the old piece with new date references in titles and subheadings.
- Rewrite your top performing content. When you re-read old articles and blogs you might find that your knowledge about a topic has improved with time or that your writing style is now better. In this case, it might be worth rewriting your top performing content altogether and republishing it as a new piece. You can even merge several older articles together to create a post that’s fresh and unique.
- Repurpose old content. Your content might have been published a while ago, but if it’s still relevant today – repurpose it to give your content strategy some juice. Interesting quotes can be popped on Twitter, stats can be updated and turned into an infographic and maybe you can take the subject matter of a post and ‘go live’ with it across social media.
- Add excitement to old web pages. Web pages need constant SEO management to ensure you’re targeting the correct keyword. You might decide to expand your sitemap in order to target popular terms more directly. Another thing you can do is to add new content such as how-to or instructional videos to product pages. You might also want to optimise for featured snippets by dividing content into question and answer sections. Or for voice search by adding content based around local SEO terms. If your content is a little on the thin side, think of ways to pad it out too.
Delete Irrelevant Posts and Pages
Sometimes, there are posts and pages on your website that you just don’t need anymore. These might still be receiving link juice, however, so it’s important not to just delete them and be done. Here’s what you can do instead:
- Create a 301 Redirect
This is ideal for URLs that still hold value as with a 301 Redirect you can redirect an old URL to a related one. This tells search engines and visitors that there’s better or newer content elsewhere on your site while still leveraging the value of quality links pointing to that page. The 301 Redirect takes Google and people to pages you want them to see rather than delivering up content that’s no longer relevant.
As a top tip, always redirect consumers to a related page and never refer them back to the homepage as this is somewhat of a pointless task if they’re looking for specific content. Note that it might be a good idea to create a new page with fresh content if you don’t have something appropriate to redirect to.
- Tell Search Engines the Content is Intentionally Gone
You can also serve a 410 Delete. This is appropriate if there’s no other content you can direct a page to. A 410 Delete essentially tells Google and visitors that you’ve deleted content on purpose and that it didn’t just disappear unintentionally. If Google can’t find a post it might return a 404 Not Found status to the search engine’s bot. A 404 crawl error will also appear in Google Search Console for that page. Google will eventually work out that you’ve deleted content and take the URL off the search result pages but this can take some time. A 410 Delete is faster.
Contact Whitefish Marketing today for a content marketing strategy to suit your brand.
