Your web pages might have been ranking well for the past 3 years although you’ve not changed anything but Google is starting to favour new content because information does become outdated at one point. Every piece of content has a lifespan which means that as it ages, it can easily slip down the page rankings into obscurity.

How can you extend your content’s lifespan?

If your older content is targeting valuable keywords that are critical to your brand and those have fallen down in the rankings, then you know it’s time you update that content.

As you probably know already, Google, as well as other popular search engines, love fresh content. When indexed, content gets a freshness ranking and as it ages, rankings might fall. It’s sort of like bread – once it goes stale, no one wants to eat anymore. It’s what they call stale content.

But that doesn’t mean you should “throw” it in the bin or forget about it. Look at some of your old pages that you’ve not updated in a while or that are starting to get less and less traffic probably because they’re no up to date, and consider updating them. You’d be surprised what you can achieve by freshening up your old content regularly. You could actually increase your page rank and send some new visitors your way.

Let’s take a look at a few ways to help get that stale content ranking again.

Refreshing and improving old content is a great and not very time-consuming way to get some extra traffic and improve your page rank.

So, here’s what you can do:

Tweak – Edit your old content to make it better. You can also tweak the keywords to improve SEO.

Update – The information on your page might have been relevant 3 years ago when you first published it but now chances are it’s out of date. Make it fresh again, add new information that has come to light over the past few months.

Check internal links – Go through your old posts and link to newer, more relevant content. This will entice visitors to go through your site as well as improve SEO for the newer content (by increasing inbound links).

Check external links – You should also check your external links. You might find that many sites have either closed or reorganised their pages which means the content you were linking to might have moved. So, make sure you check your external links and update them where necessary.

What else are you doing to freshen up your old content? Share your tips and advice in a comment below.