Stale Content SEO Micro-Optimisation: Quick Tip

If you have an old article you are trying to resurface, repurpose or republish, here’s what you need to do:

Title Optimisation

Make sure the slug does not contain any dates – such as my-glorious-blog-2022 – if it does, then it gets tricky, and it involves 301 redirects, and it’s possibly not a good idea.

Make sure the title contains the current year – such as My Glorious Article Blog 2022. Make sure it’s still relevant. Do not change it completely.

Content Optimisation

Update your content and add more details, more images, more example, whatever you need to add, depending on your niche and your SEO competitors.

Media Optimisation

Update your images. Larger images, fresh screenshots, higher resolution. Make sure you have a high resolution featured image.

Date Optimisation

Keep the old date, but add a small notice at the top saying “Updated on Wednesday, July 27, 2022”. To take it even further, add a time element to this notice, such as:

<p>
    Updated on <time datetime="YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD">Wednesday, July 27, 2022</time>
</p>

Make sure you add the correct date and timezone.

Last is flush your cached social Open Graph details, and submit all changes to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Note that if there is duplicate content with content in JSON-LD, then Google can take it as an attempt to manipulate data.

That’s it, pretty quick, wasn’t it?