Updating Old Articles

Being an online content creator, your content are your products. If you write blogs or articles online, then these are your products as an online writer. Just like physical products, they need to be updated from time to time to keep them fresh for the readers. If you do not, you may not be fully utilizing the income potential of your articles.

Ranking and Visibility

Can you still use an old article to generate reading interest from your website? Yes, As long as Google ranks your old article and website readers continue to find your article, then you can still generate interest from website readers.

Take note that I specifically said if Google ranks your website and readers continue to find your article. This is the single most important part in a website business. No matter what you do with your website just as long as it is found, it has the potential of making you money.

This is because Google has been continually updating its search algorithm. It has been trying to provide website readers with what it perceives to be the most relevant and quality content it can index for the viewers.

According to SEO experts, Google checks if a website and its articles are continuously updated. It checks if the quality of the website and its articles have improved. So, if you created an article before, chances are it would go down in the search rankings if it stays In its original form.

Would It Be Like Serving Last Night’s Meal Again?

This is a genuine concern for many online writers especially if they begin to think that their readers would abandon their website or blog if they perceive that they are being served rehashed unoriginal content.

The following questions need to be answered: “How soon are you updating your content? Has time passed long enough that your article or blog now requires updating to be more relevant?”

For example, if you wrote an article about a certain product that is always updated you need to update your article too. Otherwise, everyone who reads your article would easily dismiss your article as irrelevant anymore. Google might even drop your article ranking.

A direct example would be if you have an article about a court case. If your article has not improved with the proceedings of the court case, other competitors writers who have more updated articles would be read more instead of your article.

Another direct example would be in fashion. If you have an article of the latest fashion trends this year, then you need to update your article next year to show the latest fashion trends next year.

In essence, your fashion article is like the dresses you are writing about. Next year, if you do not update your article your article just like the clothes you featured would be seen as has beens and not worth following online anymore.

Remember Your Image as an Expert

You also need to keep up your image as an expert on the articles and blogs you have written. There are jobs that require its practitioners to perform annual competency tests. This is like you as an online writer.

If for example you are a doctor or someone who works in the field of medicine who has written an online article about how to cure a certain disease, then you need to update your article when a new cure comes along.

If you don’t, then you can become perceived by your readers and even by your patients as not being a top notch doctor or medical expert anymore.

If you however continue to update your article as soon as a new article comes along, then your readers and patients would develop an image of you as someone who is in the cutting edge of their field. Your article actually greatly affects your professional image to people.

This is the reason why once you have written an article, you need to treat it like a plant that needs to be nourished and hopefully one day would bear fruits. If you just write an article one time and do not take care of it, it would die a slow death and would not be a benefit to you anymore.

No Timestamps

You might be thinking: “If my content should be fresh, should I add a timestamp on my articles?” Articles that are for and against timestamps on online articles abound online. It is notable to state that both instances of articles exist in the top rankings of Google.

Should you put a timestamp in your online article? There are instances when a timestamp on an article is needed. If you are presenting a news article, then it is certainly a requirement that you add a timestamp to the news article.

This is because there are articles like news articles in which the date and time needs to be known by the reader. However, if your article is about how to fix an engine for example then you do not need a timestamp. This is the article is not dependent on the date the article was written.

When you put a timestamp, it is like putting an expiration date on a food product. As time passes by, your article would be perceived as less and less relevant if the readers puts a strong emphasis on your article’s timestamp.

Does Google Care About Timestamps?

As I have said, you could find articles without timestamps at the top search rankings of Google. So the issue of whether or not SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is negatively affected by timestamps is not an issue at all.

I have also seen articles that are over four years old still rank at the top of Google search results. I have also seen articles more than ten years old still rank at the top twenty of search rankings in Google.

So Google has complex search algorithms and timestamps are not a big factor or are just one of the many factors in ranking at the top search results of Google. One thing many experts at SEO will tell anyone however is that content is king when it comes to search results.

This must be the reason that as I have previously stated, there are articles that are ten years old but are still ranking well in Google search results. They may or may not have timestamps, but their content is still relevant to a particular search query.

Do You Need To Write New Content All the Time?

This must be one of the most important question you should ask yourself when you are creating an article. As previously mentioned, to an online writer like you, your digital writings are your product. It needs to be properly maintained to be productive.

There are many writers who write an article once and then forget about it after posting it online. By doing so, they put themselves at risk of exhausting their subjects for writing. There are just so many articles that can be written for a narrow set of subjects.

There are people involved in the website ownership business who advise that after a few months or at most a year, a writer should update their website articles. This is especially so if the writer has written more than a hundred article for their website.

This is because once you write more than a hundred article, you start to run out of new ideas to write. Some remedy this situation by rehashing their articles. They write very similar articles to the ones they have written before.

These online writers have the idea that by posting as many articles as they can, they stand to make more money in their website business. This has already been proven untrue by the Income School video titled:

Video: 74 Successful Niche Site Ideas

In this video, they discuss several websites that are already succeeding either in terms of their huge page view numbers or their monthly income. If you watch the video intently, you would notice that some of the websites mentioned have just a few articles.

Their articles do not even number in the hundreds yet they have huge numbers of page views and are earning good monthly income. This proves that the strategy of mass producing online writing content is not the best strategy to do.

So it is entirely possible that even with a limited number of articles you can still make a profitable income from a website business. However, as previously warned if you do not keep your articles fresh there is a danger they might not generate any income for you at all.

Is Your Content Always Evergreen to Rank Higher?

Although you are a writer at heart and enjoy writing, do not forget that maintaining a website has costs. You need to pay for example for website hosting. If you use high quality images in your articles, you also probably pay for them as well. These are just some of your costs.

Don’t forget also that you have to pay yourself as well, if you want your online writing to be your income source. This is the reason why you have to also think like a businessman and minimize your time while maximizing your income.

You should follow what successful businesses do and update your product which in your case would be your online writings. By keeping your online writings or articles evergreen and fresh you keep you old readers interested in the development of your article while getting new readers for your article as well.

There are many reasons why you should do this. But these are the most important ones:

- You Already Know Which Article Sells or are Popular:

This means that when you update your most popular articles you have a certain degree of certainty that you would get a lot of readers and your time won’t be wasted, not unlike when you have to do a new article whose reader acceptance is unknown.

This is very evident with articles that have a recurring theme. For example, if you wrote a successful article about the most famous actors of the year for the current year, then it makes sense to update your article to name the new famous actors for the next year.

- Your Old Unpopular Articles get a New Chance

You may have articles that have very little page views or none at all. This may be because these articles were written when you are just starting out your website business and have very little or no viewers at all.

They may have been so unappealing that nobody read them. Whatever the reason, you have already spent significant time writing this article. If you improved or updated your article, you would definitely spend lesser time writing it rather than creating a new article from scratch.

From a business standpoint this is a good move. You already know that your old article is not successful and spending a lot of time in it does not make a whole lot of sense. But spending a bit of time trying to improve the content so that it becomes more marketable makes sense.

- Your Articles Get Longer as You Update them

One thing very good about updating your article is that you tend to make it longer as you add more information. New information naturally comes along as times passes by. This is especially so if you have been closely monitoring the progress of the subjects of your articles.

According to SEO experts like Neil Patel, the longer your article is, the better is your article’s chance of ranking higher in the Google search rankings. For example, a 500 word article would tend to lose to articles that contain 1,000 words or more.

Just take a look at the top ranking articles in Google. Many of these articles tend to be written in the long form and not condensed. In my Google searches, I have for example never seen a short article rank higher than a much longer article.

Why You Might Actually Need To Update Your Content

Let’s face it. Writing new articles can be very exhausting especially if you are first building the content volume of your website. Chances are, the first thing you did when you first created your website is to write like crazy as fast as you can to show that you have a website that has real content.

- Fix Spelling and Grammar Errors:

You may want to update your old article for spelling and grammar errors. This is especially true if you use don’t use a word processor and tools that do not check for correct spelling and grammar.

Almost every writer knows that spelling checkers and grammar tools can only go so far. It is very likely that if you read your old articles you would find these errors.

According to SEO experts, spelling and grammar errors contribute to Google’s low ranking of an article. This is because Google is very keen on improving the user experience when reading a website and incoherent words are sure to make the user experience very appalling.

- Removing Broken Links

Some website links do expire for a wide variety of reasons. The reasons are not important but the effects they have on your website is important. Broken links are one of the reasons why Google lowers the search rankings of an online article.

Besides a lower ranking in Google, you also would irritate your article reader when they try to access a broken link especially when you made it clear to them that they must essentially click on the link to better understand your article.

Irritation can change to anger in an instant if the reader of your article is let down by your broken link. A regular reader of the articles in your website is a great asset in the long run as the more they read, the greater are your page views. Losing even one can be very bad for you.

Conclusion

Your articles are your product if you are in the business of online writing or website business. Just like any product, your article needs to be updated from time to time so that it does not go stale and slip in the minds of readers as well as in Google’s search rankings.

Unlike an entirely new article from scratch, an updated article needs less time to be rewritten because the basis structure of the article is known already. You know what works and what does not.

Lastly, an article is a reflection of the writer themselves. If an article keeps getting better, it means that the writer is also improving. If the article becomes stale, it is very likely that the writer won’t progress and is likely to be forgotten in the long term.

The Versatility of a Writer.