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Should the biggest focus of your SEO efforts go towards creating new content or updating existing content?
In my opinion, you should spend about half of your SEO efforts updating old content and the other half creating new content.
Here’s why.
Web pages generate value over time
Your website content can remain relevant for years to come.
Pages that have been published for a while have generated links and visibility. This creates a lot of value on the page.
This means that these pages can still show up in search results for the queries your target audience uses today.
Freshness is generally a minor concern for Page Quality Rating. “Stale” pages may have high Page Quality Scores.
from Google Guidelines for Search Quality Evaluators
What does it mean?
Older content can still be relevant and considered high quality.
Think: An informational page about the American Civil War.
However, other types of old content can only remain relevant if the material is considered “evergreen” and is up-to-date.
Over time, any website could have hundreds or thousands of outdated web pages.
Google might not trust a site where two-thirds of the pages are, say, three years old or older and have outdated information. Especially if these topics are being updated by your competition.
You can do a quick check of your old content and see for yourself. When you published the page years ago, did it rank on page 1 in search results? And now it’s on page 2 or below?
A content update can usually bring you back to page 1.
Normal things depreciate over time. If not maintained, web pages eventually rot and become useless. But well maintained, they remain a valuable asset.
If a web page is designed and researched, described and written, edited and optimized (and engagement objects such as images and videos are added), that can take eight hours of quality work. This time has a significant cost.
You can ignore it and basically delete it, or you can keep it fresh. We prefer the latter as a content strategy and tactic.
What Google says
Google says you should spend time maintaining your website to ensure quality:
…unmaintained/abandoned “old” websites or unmaintained and inaccurate/misleading content is a reason for a low page quality rating.
Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines
Takeaway food:
An old or unmaintained web page can be considered low quality. This is especially true for “your money or your life” pages, those that can affect health, finances, etc. of a person A web page that contains inaccurate information is low quality, period. Depending on your subject, you may need to refresh your web pages frequently just to keep your information current.
In a 2019 “Office Hours” session, Google’s John Mueller talked about perennial versus fresh content:
“… We try to strike a balance between kind of showing perennial content that’s been around and kind of seeing more of the reference content and kind of fresher content and especially when we can tell that people are looking for the content most cool”.
You can listen to that answer here:
Mueller is likely referring to the concept of “the query deserves freshness”: the types of search queries whose results should reflect new content. You can read more about this in a 2011 Google blog post here.
In another video from Office Hours 2021, Mueller addressed how to handle old content:
” … if it’s something that you think is good content that you want to put out with your website, with your name, then I would keep it. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s bad. But if you look at it and say, oh, this is embarrassing now, I don’t want it online. It’s so bad. Then it’s something where I would say it enhances it or it removes it.”
You can listen to that answer here:
What to do? A content audit
In addition to creating new web pages for your SEO program, a web content audit will be key to prioritizing how you update old pages.
A content audit identifies weak and underperforming content on your website so you can improve it.
Using Google Analytics and a tool like Screaming Frog, Semrush, or our SEOToolSet, you can get all the data you need to understand your site’s web pages.
Once you’ve gathered the necessary data, divide your web pages into three categories. Those who:
Get more rankings and traffic (eg page 1 of search results). You have the potential to get better rankings and traffic (eg page 2 of search results). these categories.
Then you can:
Focus on reinforcing content in the first two categories. Figure out what to do with the rest, which is the underperforming content. Some web pages may need a content update, others may need optimization. And some content just needs a 301 redirect to a more current URL on the same topic.
Grow and maintain your content
The beauty of SEO is that your web pages build value over time through visibility and links. So all the great work you put into it can continue to pay off in traffic and hopefully revenue.
But you need to maintain your website throughout its life cycle.
So, to strengthen your SEO program, make sure you spend 50% of your content-focused time creating new web pages and 50% of your time updating old ones.
As a last note… Your website may have hundreds or even thousands of outdated pages, and keeping track of them can be a huge project.
Create updates on a regular schedule just like you do with new content creation.
Get into a rhythm of identifying existing pages related to each new page and update or consolidate them as part of your content creation process.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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About the author
Bruce Clay is the founder and president of Bruce Clay Inc., a global digital marketing optimization company offering search engine optimization, PPC management, paid social media marketing, SEO-friendly site architecture, content development and SEO tools and education. Clay authored the book “Search Engine Optimization All-In-One For Dummies,” now in its fourth edition, and “Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals.” He wrote the first web page analysis tool, created the Search Engine Relationship Chart®, and is credited with being the first to use the term search engine optimization. Bruce Clay’s renowned SEO training course is available online at SEOtraining.com.
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