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New For Old – Leveraging Existing Content

Is your website full of stale content? If it is, there is a good chance it is being overlooked by the search engines in favour of much fresher and more up-to-date content. You can make good use of that old content, if you know how to leverage it.

There are several approaches you can take to that old content. Here are a couple of approaches that can be beneficial to your website and perhaps breathe new life into those old pages.

• Use the existing title and URL but totally rewrite the content with the latest information. Be sure to include a date somewhere that shows it is current.
• Keep the content but place prominent links to a new page that has the most up-to-date content.
• Using the old content to link to more relevant pages. This can help to pass link juice to pages that need a little extra, however, it does little for the page itself.
• Keep the old content but add a new section that has the most up-to-date information available.

Each approach has its pros and cons. For example, old product pages are just that  – old. Use them to link to other pages, or delete them altogether. Just remember to use redirects – you can also put in a request to Google to have those pages removed from its index.

Your old content, while stale when it comes to user usefulness, still has some value. It may have accumulated inbound links, if that is the case then either pass that to other pages, or capitalise on it by updating the content. Replacing old content with new content can be a smart move – give it some thought and boost your search engine optimisation outcomes.