Every blogger has old blog posts (articles) that didn't receive the attention they deserved. You may not care about it, but you should. The older a post gets, the less likely it's going to be seen by anyone or anything besides search engines. Why not revive those old posts by turning them into new posts?

The Idea

While I was examining unique pageviews in Google Analytics, I reversed the order to see which posts received the least pageviews and discovered there was "gold in them thar hills". I sat back and pondered how to bring those posts to the surface. While there are many ways to do it, turning selected old posts into new posts is how I intend to accomplish this feat.

You may think of your old blog posts as valuable historical references and you may be reluctant to pursue this course of action. It's obviously not for everyone and you have to weigh the potential advantages and disadvantages associated with doing anything of this magnitude.

Rewrite

It doesn't do any good to just revive any old post. You have to examine the content and see if it's worth rewriting, and rewriting is almost always required. Sometimes a lame post is simply too lame to be revived.

While rewriting, go through your subsequent posts and see if there's anything relevant you can add to it or reference in your post. Perhaps you can link to other valuable content. The possibilities are endless.

Republish

This is your opportunity to give the post a better post title, a better headline. Perhaps the original title wasn't descriptive enough. Perhaps it was too long. Short and succinct titles that are also descriptive work the best.

Take your time and check your spelling, your grammar and your punctuation. Why not make your new post the best it can possibly be?

Moving Comments

What if the old post you're working on has comments you want to keep (always a good idea)? By deleting the old post, you also delete the comments. Move the comments before you delete the post. The Move Comments plugin for WordPress works very well. I've already used it to move comments that were posted in the wrong place.

Delete and Redirect

This is the part where you have to be extremely careful. You need to keep the full, original URL in a safe place until after you've completed the redirect. I don't know about you, but my memory isn't good enough to remember any URL.

There are several plugins for WordPress available (do a search) but I recommend the Redirection plugin from Urban Giraffe. It's an indispensable tool that can be used for a whole lot more than this.

You can also add redirects directly to your blog's htaccess file, if htaccess is used by your server software. I don't know how to do it, but I'm sure a search for it will provide the exact syntax for you. If your server doesn't use htaccess, I don't know if you can even do redirects like this.

Go ahead and delete the old post. So long. Goodbye. Hasta la vista, baby! Now, go into whatever method you're going to use for redirection and redirect the old URL to the new one.

Advantages

• You get to publish a new blog post without needing inspiration. Writer's block be damned!
• Since it's a fresh post, the likelihood of it being read and commented on is far greater than the likelihood of the old post being read at all.
• The chances of being linked to, and every post needs backlinks, greatly increase.
• You get to reduce archive clutter.

Disadvantages

• Google PageRanks (PR) for both posts may drop to 0 until the next PR update. Of course, that's only important if you care about PR.
• The PR passed to outbound links may drop to 0 until the next PR update. Your linkees (yes, I just coined that word) may be a little annoyed when their posts and/or pages drop in PR accordingly. Oh well, at least you won't be leaking any PR from those pages.
• The historical value of the old post is lost.

Conclusion

This isn't something I'd recommend doing if your blog is less than a year old or doesn't have a lot of old posts. There are many other ways to bring them back to life. Explore your options and use some creativity. Use plugins if you can find them. Whatever you do, don't let those old posts sit and gather dust. Unless, of course, that's what you want.

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