Rewrite, Republish and Redirect Old Blog Posts

Rewrite, Republish and Redirect Old Blog Posts - Recycle Those Electrons!

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You may think of your old blog posts as valuable historical references and you may be reluctant to pursue this course of action.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.

November 27th, 2007 By RT Cunningham | Categories: Writing | Tags: PageRank, recycle, redirect, rewrite, WordPress |

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hari on November 27th, 2007 at 11:23 pm (Reply)

Unfortunately some of those idea won't work on other blogging systems than WordPress, mainly due to lack of plugins to achieve such effects and a different URL structure (which prevents URL redirection).

But on the whole I agree with the general idea. Older articles really get buried deeply in dust and it's part of the way a blog is structured.

In my blogging software, I'm going to try something different to prevent this "dust gathering" by doing something different with the content organization and make it a little less "chronological" in nature.

RT Cunningham on November 27th, 2007 at 11:31 pm (Reply)

You're right. This was aimed at the 80 percent who have software that can handle it.

Good luck on your project. I'd like to see how you defeat the dust bunnies. Hey, wait a second. If you don't mind, I'd like to write about your new adventure, kind of like: Hari vs. The Dust Bunnies

Josh Spaulding on November 27th, 2007 at 11:47 pm (Reply)

I've thought about doing something similar in the past, but unfortunately, many of my really old posts fall under the following:

Sometimes a lame post is simply too lame to be revived.

When I first began my blog it wasn't a serious project. I didn't even really know what blogging was all about. Some of those posts are just trash. I've even deleted a few of them, but I've "revived" a few as well.

btw, your trackback came up in Akismets filter. My comments/trackbacks were for the longest time until I just contacted them. The next day I was golden
Josh Spaulding's last blog post..Is your Online Business Model Basic or Complex?

RT Cunningham on November 28th, 2007 at 12:05 am (Reply)

Thanks for telling me. No one else has. I just contacted akismet.com to get them to remove me.

Frank C on November 28th, 2007 at 12:17 am (Reply)

I've done this two ways.

First, I've taken posts from my dead blogs, dressed them up a bit to eliminate any possible dupe penalty, and reposted them on OpTempo. One such post became my most popular.

The other way is to create an update post that refers back to the old one. I've done this with a few posts and it's created traffic for all of them.

Frank C's last blog post..Is There a Human in the House?

RT Cunningham on November 28th, 2007 at 12:52 am (Reply)

I've done the second, but not the first because I don't have any dead blogs.

Rod Templeton on November 28th, 2007 at 1:17 am (Reply)

This is actually something that I've done between sites. A couple of posts on blogging that went nowhere on my personal site got posted on BloggingNotes and they generated their own traffic.

Evidently it's just a matter of visibility.
Rod Templeton's last blog post..Play In The Sandbox Before You Post

RT Cunningham on November 28th, 2007 at 1:20 am (Reply)

You're spot on. Thanks for stopping by, Rod!

Mike on November 28th, 2007 at 2:17 am (Reply)

Some people look down on repackaging old blog posts but I think it's a great way to give a new spin to an old post.

Like Frank C says, my choice has previously been to write an update to the original with links between the two. Perhaps I'll look at completely revamping the post and using the tips above for the next time I'm clearing out the dusty archives.

Mike's last blog post..Bonjour, Hallo, Ciao, Hola

RT Cunningham on November 28th, 2007 at 3:45 am (Reply)

I think my first repackaged post will kill two previous posts and I think my second one will kill three previous posts.

The new posts will be way more interesting.

RT Cunningham on November 28th, 2007 at 3:43 am (Reply)

There are currently 1,001 posts and 5,364 comments, contained within 92 categories and 131 tags shown on my dashboard. I want it to reach 2001 much slower than it reached this point. My blog is only 17 months old and that means an average of 58 posts per month. This is too much considering my first 4 or 5 months were really slow.

Recycling will slow the average down.

Shrinidhi Hande on November 28th, 2007 at 12:38 pm (Reply)

I have some readers who are visiting my blog right from Day one. Recycling old posts will annoy them as they have already read it…

I do update previous posts and refine them whenvever possible and try to get some visibility by listing them in side bar or writing a quick summary of those posts or linking them in relevant articles etc.

Shrinidhi Hande's last blog post..My early Journalism Experiences

RT Cunningham on November 28th, 2007 at 9:41 pm (Reply)

Recycling them would be annoying if you didn't rewrite them. If you rewrote them, and mentioned it was an update somehow, I doubt anyone would mind.

hari on November 28th, 2007 at 8:04 pm (Reply)

I've been thinking about this idea and I am in favour of preserving the original version of any post. I feel that however "lame", it reflects my thought process at an earlier time and rightly or wrongly, I think it should stay as it is.

Even for my own reference, it's better than an article remains as it is and preserve the flavour of the original times.

After all, all of us evolve in our style and technique. A blog creates a snapshot of these reflections over time. Editing older posts will kill this snapshot and maybe the writing will become too homogenous.

Unless there's a really serious error/problem with an older post, I prefer not to "re-edit" them.

RT Cunningham on November 28th, 2007 at 9:47 pm (Reply)

I usually re-edit to remove or change something, like a reference, dead link in the post or something like that.

You have to understand, I'm not talking about wholesale rewriting sprees. An example is that I wrote about a splitter that I bought (twice) and I didn't put any effort into either one. I can combine the information from both into one post, delete the old ones and redirect them to the single one and make the new post a much, much better post. Those old ones were written when I didn't even care what blogging was.

I wrote other posts dealing with buying our car. These were like diary posts and didn't contain much. Combining them into one would make it a much better story.

Anyway, the point is that I can't do that for 95 percent of the old stuff… there's just selected topics that can be updated and improved and I don't think it'll take anything away from that period of time.

Your posts, Hari, are always well-written. Even the really old stuff is better than most of my new stuff.
2. hari on November 29th, 2007 at 12:51 am (Reply)
  
  Well, actually you're right. Dead links can become a real issue. And I've been experimenting with "reviving" old posts by my "Blog History" kind of posts.
  
  Of course, spelling mistakes or any simple grammatical errors always get corrected when I spot them.
  
  Your example is quite good. I guess that is the way it should be done, rather than wholesale editing sprees like you said.

Doug Robertson on November 29th, 2007 at 3:02 am (Reply)

I agree with hari's last comment, that as lame as some of the early posts might be, I think the original versions should be preserved. Even those that we might wince at when re-reading. Yikes. Revamping and rewriting a previous (perhaps improved) post could probably be done pretty subtly. Depends on your topic, too. Mine being much about current news and stuff, I try to keep the old ones alive by linking to them in a "remember when this happened? well…" kind of way.

Doug Robertson's last blog post..Pets Yea, Gay Partners Nay

RT Cunningham on November 29th, 2007 at 2:24 pm (Reply)

In a perfect blog world, I would agree. But even if you link to really old stuff, it can still languish in obscurity.

Political Jaywalker on January 20th, 2008 at 5:19 am (Reply)

That's a very good idea RT, I wonder if it will work the same in blogger where all I need to do is change the post date to current and it will be up from the bottom. Of course rewriting and dressing it up will help so as not to annoy regular readers.

Political Jaywalker's last blog post..William Hung's Era Officially Over

RT Cunningham on January 20th, 2008 at 5:34 am (Reply)

Well, you don't want the search engines or links from other sites pointing to a link that no longer exists. With Blogger, your options are limited but you can probably get something going that works well enough.

Consider a meta redirection from an old post. It's not as good as using a 301 redirect, but it should still work.

PJ on January 21st, 2008 at 1:28 pm (Reply)

ooops, lol I am technologically challenge so I did not know about losing the search engine link.

I hope you don't mind if I ask a dumb question, how do I do a meta redirection?

PJ's last blog post..William Hung's Era Officially Over

RT Cunningham on January 21st, 2008 at 1:43 pm (Reply)

Not a dumb question at all. It's something that needs to be in the head of the page, something like:

<META http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.indiana.edu/~smithclas/l200">

Of course, you have to change the target URL..

I'm not familiar (although I should be) in how far you can go with Blogger. I don't even know if you have access to the head of each page. Oops. I guess you don't really have to have access to the head. This one executed it as soon as I tried to bring up the comment. (I had to alter the tags.)

PJ on January 22nd, 2008 at 1:30 pm (Reply)

I guess that's one of the limitations of blogger. Anyway, I hope it works, what I did was blog an article I have dugged last year.

I got confused when I saw the same title came out of my blog thus I included Update. I did not realize that although I have the same title it had a different url on date.

I goggled it and it returned both entries so I guess that will work to… I hope, hahaha.

PJ's last blog post..Update on Filipina Jazz Singer wows listeners in the USA