Update and Republish Old Content for a Ranking Boost

Objective: Generate more organic search traffic to existing content that lives on your blog through improved keyword rankings.

How: Within a lot of websites that publish content regularly on their blog, there are often a ton of posts that are sitting really deep in their website’s architecture. This is primarily due to time-based blog feeds – i.e., the older a blog post is, the lower down in the blog feed it will be, until it goes even further down into the various archived pages of the blog.

A perfect example of this was with the HubSpot blog. We produce over 250 blog posts every month and we have hundreds of blog feed pages. The blog posts published a few years ago will very quickly drift down into page 30, 40, 50, etc. of the blog, and consequently very deep in the overall architecture of the website.

In general, pages deeper in the architecture of a website will get a lower share of internal PageRank. Unless the page has a significant amount of backlinks from external webpages, it’s unlikely to rank very well in the search engines.

One quick solution here is to update the date of the blog post to the current day and republish it. This will fire it to the top of page 1 of your blog feed and give it a significant PageRank boost.

Not only that, but if you actually add some extra content to the blog post and update any old stats/references, then you can fully re-promote it (via social media, communities, email, etc.) and earn more backlinks from external websites.

I’ve used this tactic, and continue to do so, across pretty much every campaign I’ve ever worked on that revolves heavily around content production and have had great results. You can see an example of this with the 105% increase in organic search traffic that my colleague, Pam Vaughan, achieved from executing this very tactic.