Impact of Updating or Republishing an Existing Post in Google’s Eyes

Last updated on July 7th, 2024 at 10:49 am

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Republishing old content is a very debated tactic - here are some legitimate reasons to republish your old posts.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

If your traffic is waning and out of date, then you should know that it can be bad for your ranking position. Experts suggest that you should republish the content on your website that has the most traffic and business on it.

You can easily find out the most read and visited posts on your website with the help of online utilities like Google Analytics. As technology improves, you can make use of it to help in increasing traffic with old posts!

There exist many mixed opinions about the republishing of old content again on websites. Some believe it can result in the accusation of self-plagiarism and can further and damage search ranking positions while others it can bring the traffic back and can also help you revive backlinks that you posted in the original article.

Google will accept the republishing in two ways, the first one is if you simply publish the content using the same URL, essentially replacing the old article, and the second way is you use a new rewritten & updated version of the same content as a completely new post.

Good Reasons to Republish Your Old Content!

Now, before we tell you how you can paraphrase or spin your old content into a newer version of it, we want you to know about the situations in which republishing makes sense.

You should never republish someone else’s content, even in a paraphrased form. This ideas in this article are geared towards republishing content you already own or have the rights to.

1. Your Content is Getting Traffic from Google but is Out of Date

By far, this is the most common and legitimate reason for republishing an older piece of content. Perhaps you had a good post which had a decent amount of traffic years ago and now there’s the possibility that search engines will still send traffic to that particular post. Now when this happens, the visitor is likely to see the content is old and immediately bounce from your website to look for something newer & more up to date. A high bounce rate will hurt your Google rankings.

Now if you want the visitor to have a positive image of your site and content then you should republish out of date content by either updating the original post or writing a new one with updated information and adding a link to it at the top of the original article so visitors landing on the article from a search engine can click through to the updated version (which will help improve your bounce rate). You can make use of online paraphrasing tools so you don’t have to rewrite all of the content from scratch – as long as you take the time to proofread the tool output and adjust as necessary.

2. Your Content isn’t Ranked on the First Page

If your primary marketing vector for your website is search engine traffic, then there’s no point in running a website if the content you are having on it isn’t ranked near the top Google SERP. If the content that you had on your site was ranked on the initial pages of Google or other search engines and now has shifted to the lower-ranked pages, then it can be because of various reasons like people plagiarizing your content. You can use a paraphrasing tool like plagiarismdetector.net after checking the duplication in your content to make a new, unique, and SEO-friendly version of your old content that you can easily rank again on the top pages in search engines!

3. Post that You Update Regularly

Suppose you are working on a topic, such as technology, that is prone to regular changes. You have to keep going back and modifying it and republishing it so that you can get the best traffic from search engines. If you are giving out bad or outdated information on your website, that will affect your rankings.

At the same time, you may not want to continuously be modifying the same post over and over due to the fact that an ever-changing post may be a difficult target for search engines to keep track of. Rewriting the old idea with new information can help, while leaving behind the old posts with appended links to the new updated version will ensure search engine traffic has a way to get to the most updated information on your site.

4. An Important Post that Should be Seen by Your Audience

Now if you have a very old website, then you should know that you have to engage your audience with old posts as well so that they can know about the history of your website and your services. This can help you increase the interest level and trust of the traffic on your website, and this is is a good reason to republish old content with updated information while leaving behind the old original articles for the sake of posterity.

Take Advantage of Google Algorithms

Google algorithms and ranking factors continuously change but Google will allow you to republish old content as long as what you republish has some added value. Lots of content on the web is copied from the other sources and still, Google indexes it. While you shouldn’t republish old content solely for the purpose of increasing your website’s content footprint, it’s a good way to do so with less effort than creating new content from scratch.