If you’ve been blogging for some time, your blog posts seem to pile up and those first blog posts you have written get buried or archived or worst, forgotten.
Some bloggers think that these old blog posts are already useless, thus they get deleted.
But these old blog posts still have some value in them.
You just have to find a way to recycle them and get them into circulation again.
With this thought, I gathered articles that I think might help everyone get an idea of what to do with old blog posts.
5 Tips for Getting Readers Viewing Your Old Blog Posts by Problogger.net
How to tweet the Life back into Old Posts by Blogussion
Reward your Readers: Update Old Blog Posts by Branding Blog
How to Monetize your Old Blog Posts by Jean-Baptiste Jung
Should You Delete Old Blog Posts? by Viloria.net
5 Tips for Reviving Old blog Posts by Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen
Spinning Old Blog Posts by John Chow
4 Ways to Bring New Life to Old WordPress blog Posts by Paul Boag
Make Money from Old blog Posts by Computer News
7 Effective Ways to Resurrect Old Blog Content by HowToMakeMyBlog.com
Why You should Use Roundup Posts for your blog: Benefits and Recommendations by DoshDosh
If you want to outsource the building or maintenance of your blog or the writing of blog posts, check out my services page:
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Andrew is a website builder and helps small businesses with their on-line presence…so they can grow their customer list and increase sales. That’s it! That’s what we do each and every day.
I haven’t got too many old posts yet but this is a useful resource for when I do. Thanks Andrew
Patricia Perth Australia
I have heard from SEO saying that we should remove outdated contents, so by this our old blogpost are also outdated. Although i am not with them on this and i don’t think there is any need to delete old posts, will you please share your views on that?
Daisy
Deleting old posts and old comments seems very odd to me.
Can you image that we would have to go into our blogs and delete old comments?
I very much doubt if they have a negative impact on SEO.
Andrew
I agree… if anything, Google having old content indexed adds to your site’s weight. A lot of these SEO “experts” make stuff up to appear knowledgeable.
Daisy,
That is some of the worse SEO advice I have ever heard. Ask them why they would have you remove indexed content and lose any traffic from it and links coming into your site because of it.
I advise my ecommerce clients to keep pages live even when a product is no longer available by updating them instead of deleting them. WHY? Because those searching for that product may not know it has been discontinued! I tell them to offer the closest new product to what they’re seeking.
Bloggers should do the same thing. Is the post outdated? Put a prominent box at the top sending to the latest information on that topic (ideally on your site).
Why eliminate a path to your site or content that is still relevant? That is simply illogical.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for sharing the helpful list of resources.
It’s helps to become skilled at repackaging old content in a creative, fresh manner.
Ryan Biddulph
Ryan,
…and possibly having a weekly or monthly action plan to do something with them.
Andrew
One thing I always advise, and did myself on my last marketing blog, is to go back over them every 3-6 months. I’d simply re-publish some using the scheduler feature.
Awesome for newer readers to not have to go browsing the archives, which most won’t, and also excellent reminders for older readers. 🙂
Dennis
Have you come across the plugin, Tweet Old Posts?
I came across it after I had scheduled this post to go live.
Well worth investigating.
Andrew
It was my understanding that it was automatic; not my style.
I wasn’t referring to twitter in my comment though.
A while back, I wrote a post about using a plugin called “Tweet Old Post” to get a lot of traffic to your older posts.
It’s a cool plugin because, after you set it up, you don’t have to do a thing to get a ton of visits via Twitter. Doing the same on Facebook, less often, helps, too. Facebook shouldn’t be used as much as Twitter, just because the majority of the people who use Facebook aren’t advertisers, they’re normal people just trying to communicate..
Joe,
I installed that plugin a few weeks ago and many of my oldest posts are my most popular this month!
Andrew
Nice list. I will definitely check out some of the articles you mentioned.
thank you for providing us various guides.. i love what Viloria has written..now i have the drive to make more and more blogs even a hundred millions of them”,
Helpfull info. I think total removing for non-usefull old posts is best action.
Hey Andrew,
I came here from Imran’s post at Blogging Junkie. You’re one of the few on the list that I havent met yet.
Some people have jumped on the bandwagon of eliminating dates from their theme setup to potentially improve the SEO of their old content while others update and repost with a new date–this works better if your permalink structure doesn’t get broken.
What are your thoughts on these strategies?
Jarret
I do remove the date from my post set-up…not for seo purposes…but for my visitors.
Many will think the information is old and not worth reading if it is over a certain date.
I’ve never re-posted with new dates – too much effort I think!
Andrew
Can you tutorial how to delete the dates?
Dennis,
You have to change the code of the theme.
I can do a quick video…made a note on my white board for a future blog post.
Thanks for the idea.
Andrew
Great post, thanks for sharing some great resources. I personally like to a get a few good links to the old valuable stuff every so often. Even though my posts rank great in Google it’s important to keep things fresh.
JR,
You may want to try the plugin Tweet Old Posts.
Andrew
Thanks, sounds interesting will check it out. By the way I won that contest on Facebook, so thanks so much for the vote!
Excellent, re: contest.
Andrew
Hey Andrew, thanks for sharing this post. These articles will really help on getting the old blog posts re-read again as if they were newly published ones.
Felicia
Exactly – some of your old posts can be your best work.
Andrew
I think there are too many ways too utilize older posts, especially those that can generate traffic.
– you can improve internal linking through older posts’ body copy by linking them to newer blog posts.
– improve their call to action to improve conversion by adding affiliate links or offering your services, especially if they are
generating substantial traffic 🙂
– updating the content is also a good way to entice new readers into followers.
Jason,
I do go back and interlink my old posts.
I think it is worth the effort.
Plus I have ScribeSEO and that helps.
Andrew
Andrew, thank you for sharing these resources. I don’t delete old blog post. I link to them or recycle them.
Rose,
I never delete them either. I link to them plus go in and link to newer ones.
Andrew
Nice list. Anyway, I never believe in throwing away or deleting away the old blogs. Who knows somebody might be searching for the exact same info and there they are buried under the heaps.
-Will-
Will,
Exactly!
Andrew
Thanks for these awesome articles!I’ve been using social media especially Tumblr and Facebook to let my friends know about an old article that I’ve written. It gives new friends and old friends a chance to read them in case they missed it when I first wrote it. I have a habit of re-reading my blog site once in every two weeks so I could update any old article so this works really well for me.