How to Repost your Old Posts for SEO Benefit

Search engines love fresh, relevant and authoritative content. Anything to bolster those objectives should help your SEO ranking.

There are two reactions to the above information.

1. Rotate all posts to refresh automatically, 3-5 posts per week. So you always  have fresh content. 
2. Remove the dates from permalinks and hope Google doesn’t notice how old your posts are.

Of course we’re going to discuss the middle ground in today’s post – Repost your posts the right way.

Like Jeff, the SEO Guy, says, “You are the best SEO for your blog”. It’s true: each situation is unique. So I’ll tell you how to do the date-change. But most importantly – what to consider before doing so. First the simple instructions:

How to Repost WordPress Posts

This is the only way to get your post to have a new date, and to go to the front of the blog. Please see below considerations (broken links) before you do this.

1. Put your post into “draft” mode. Click Update.
2. Edit, if desired. (please read considerations below first)
3. Schedule or Publish Immediately.

Considerations for Reposted Blog Posts

The reasons to re-publish are quite obvious: a chance to optimize, re-do photos and media, and bring to the front of the blog again. However, just editing the post and clicking “Update” will not re-publish the post. It will update it, in exactly the same order as it already is. 

If your post is one year old and you update it, it will still be one year old. It will be in the same location in the archives as it always was. This allows you to edit a post any time without it going to the front of the blog.

SEO (Google’s) View of Time 

Before you schedule all the post dates to TODAY, think about the weight of time. Some other metrics of SEO are longevity of the domain and authority of the website. The longer it has been around correlates to the authority that Google will give it.

SEO / Google’s View of Redirects

If you have dates in your permalinks consider whether republishing will do more harm than good. If you republish as instructed, you will change the link. This will break the previous link – that post just disappeared. If you’d like to remove the dates from your permalinks see this tutorial.

You will need to create a redirect from the old post to the new one.

SEO View of Change

One more thing – if your post is doing well, I would caution against making drastic changes. We don’t know all the factors that go into Google’s decision making process and if your post is on the first page, are the edits worth the risk of losing that top spot?

SEO & Readers

The most important part of SEO is user experience. If no one likes your site, Google won’t either. So if re-publishing try to add something of value to your post. It needs to make sense if you are ‘updating’ it in your readers’ eyes.

If there isn’t much to change about your post, you can schedule it for a few weeks ago and the content will likely not show to your regular readers on the home page.

Publish vs Update Dates

Google has an index of your link, and it’s history. So it doesn’t matter if WordPress sends out your update date, or the publish date, Google always knows!

To prevent confusion among your regular readers, you can also add a note to the bottom of the post that it was ‘originally posted on…’ and include an original date or new date. If it makes sense, you might also make a note of the new features / information in the newer version of the post. This is a good idea if the post isn’t that old and is being republished. 

Above all, write for your readers. Take those old posts and refresh them in a way that makes sense to your readers. Make the posts multi-media friendly, add more instructions and create a stronger inner linking structure. If your readers love the new version, so will Google!*

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*Please know that I cannot predict how Google will rank your page. This advice is to guide you to make your own decisions regarding SEO.