Does old articles have an impact on website SEO?
Early in the 21st century, some of the most powerful and well-known businesses realized the provision of specialized articles and the production of valuable content for the online marketing loophole that could drive a large number of users to the home page of the website and the targeted pages, leading to more sales of products and services.
Some businesses also considered blogging as an opportunity to earn revenues.
Unfortunately, the first attempts to create blogs were not so fascinating experiences. There was no attention to the quality and attractiveness of the content of these blogs. Many corporate blogs were just a bunch of texts and did not pay much attention to content marketing principles in producing articles.
Every business blog is more like a greenhouse at home. Having a greenhouse in the living space can help the home’s beauty, clean the air inside the house, excite the guests and create a comfortable atmosphere in the home.
Today, the conditions of these greenhouses are a bit better than the past, and most businesses have realized the value of this space more than ever. The only annoying thing is that some websites have old and numerous articles that have been abandoned!
These conditions put the content teams and SEO companies in a hint of ambiguity and skepticism that raises some of the fundamental questions:
- What are the old articles of the website that have a good position, but its content is not usable?
- Will removing these articles, cause loss of website credibility and position?
What are the problems caused by these old articles?
The excessive attention of webmasters to the quantity of articles produced, produces content farms and neglects the quality of the generated content. If we look at the story in technical terms, the loss of old and worthwhile articles can make Google crawl budget better on the pages of your website.
Let’s go back to the greenhouse example. If you are supposed to create thousands of plants and weeds in your greenhouse, it will result in less energy to your main and important plants. In fact, weeds feed on the energy in the soil and cause the main plants to not get fed well, which means energy dissipation.
The length of time crawlers crawling your website to review articles produced are limited, and this time should not be spent on reviewing your old and vain articles for your website.
On the other hand, the content of your articles represents your brand. Improving the quality of the articles will increase your credibility and value in the minds of the audience. The content of your website should be of value to your audience, and this is not possible with the optimization and constant care of the generated content.
If you find that the value of a valuable blog can be useful to the website, we will continue to help you learn how to use this opportunity more effectively.
Rate the old website articles
The first step you should take to improve the website’s SEO is by using the old blog articles and collecting statistics and information about their performance.
You can access the generated content database based on which content management system (CMS) you use. You can also check the URL of the articles through the console tool and Google Analytics.
Once you have gathered the information you need, you should review and evaluate these articles. Now it’s the turn of the hardest thing in the world; after evaluating these articles, you need to decide on keeping or removing them. There are five important questions to answer when evaluating articles:
1. Is the content of the article useful for the user?
Useful content gives the user information or entertains them. A useful article should answer the user’s question, it can solve the user’s problem or be attractive to them. This useful content can be any type of content you think and have (text, image or video).
2. Is the content in question worthwhile?
Pages that have high hits through search engines, articles that have become a natural link to the website, or those that lead to a user’s purchase, will be in the category of valuable content for the websites.
3. Is the content good enough?
There may be articles on your blog that are worthwhile in terms of value content, but are not well-prepared and the principles of content production are not met. For example, articles with many typographical errors fall into this category.
4. Is the article relevant to the subject of the business?
The content of the articles should be relevant to your website and field of work. Otherwise, there is no reason to keep these articles up.
5. Is your subject or text content repetitive?
While evaluating articles, you may find articles that are similar in nature or appear to be completely copied. These articles may cause problems such as copyrighted content.
What should be done with old articles that are still valuable?
Answer the five top questions about the fate of the old articles. Articles that need to be deleted can be referenced to the most relevant article or home page of your website with Redirect 301.
After you have stripped out valuable articles from worthless of the articles, you need to take steps to take advantage of the value of these articles. Updating, increasing the information inside the articles, and improving the writing and appearance of things need to be on your agenda for these articles.
1. Improving the quality and structure of the content
To get started, it’s best to edit these articles in writing. Articles should have a good reputation and communicate with the user as easily as possible.
The next step is to adhere to the principles of SEO and content creation in the article. Reviewing and locating related links, text replacements, and Schema markup are some of the important things to be done.
The third stage is the improvement of the apparent condition. Adding attractive images and videos, or using bullet points and numbers to improve the appearance of articles is one of the most important things to be done in older articles.
2. Updating and adding information
Articles that do not provide up-to-date and valuable content are not applicable to your audience. But some articles have a lot of potential for updating and gaining ground. One way of returning old articles around valuable articles is to update their information. According to published statistics, blogs that update old posts have a chance of gaining 74 more visitors.
Adding information is another way of enriching old articles. New information obtained, changing rules, or adding new rules, and new events are subjects that can help you add valuable information to old articles.
3. Reproduction of content on social networks
If you spend time and money improving content creation, you should target the product to your audience. To do this, we suggest introducing updated content on social networks and displaying it in the top articles or even placing it in the home page of the website by changing the publication date.
The last step is to track the results
You must take the last step whenever your mission is to delete or update old articles. In fact, the last step is to track the work results and the impact of the changes you have made.
The Google Toolbar Console tool helps you compare the position and statistics of each page’s views before and after the changes. Improve rank in target keywords, increase your CTR, and increasing the time the users are on the page are factors that can determine the positive or negative changes made.
Note that improving and updating the content should be done continuously. In fact, it is part of the content team to review old articles. If we review all of the website’s articles within a specified period of time, and do not overlook them for a long time, we will not understand the impact of the changes.
