The Art of the Rewrite
Why would you want to rewrite and republish an old article? When should you or shouldn't you do it? Can you do a rewrite without republishing? Before I get into the answers to the questions, a little background is in order.
In November of 2007, I recommended you should rewrite, republish and redirect old blog posts. Then in January, I recommended you should expand and expound while rewriting those old posts. A couple of days later, I recommended that you stay focused on specific topics in each post. Each recommendation was designed to get more and better traffic to your new posts.
Since I wrote those, my own search traffic has doubled. Using some more techniques, such as link clustering and controlling meta information, I expect my search traffic to double again in another month or less.
When should you rewrite and republish an article?
There are a few indicators that can tell you when an old post isn't doing too well. It could be positioned very far from the top 10 in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for the main search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, or not at all. It could have 0 or very few comments (I would consider anything less than 3 as very few). Perhaps no one is linking to it, including you with your own internal links.
I'm pretty sure the search engines index newer posts more often than the older ones. If your old post is past a certain age, and depending on how many posts your blog contains at the time, you would probably be much better off rewriting and republishing rather than just rewriting. I'm using a year as my cutoff date because I have an average (right now) of 100 posts per month.
When should you rewrite but not republish?
If an article is only a month old, for example, a rewrite probably wouldn't require much effort. It usually only means minor editing to include more keywords or rewording a sentence or two. In my opinion, you wouldn't want to republish anything that's fairly new.
Again, it boils down to the age of the post, but there's another factor to be considered. Usually, the more often you write, the more the quality of your writing improves. That's not always the case, but it seems to be the rule and not the exception.
Questions you have to ask yourself.
Before you attempt to rewrite an article, whether you're going to republish it or not, you have to ask yourself some hard questions:
- Could I have written it better?
- Have my writing abilities improved enough to make a difference?
- Did I leave something out, intentionally or unintentionally?
- Is the topic worth revisiting?
- Can I rewrite it without making it look like a rewrite?
- Can I handle it if the rewrite ranks as poorly as the original?
Those are the questions I ask myself each time I do it. I've done it several times and I'm pretty sure you can't guess which articles are which.
The Art of the Rewrite?
Writing is an art form. In my opinion, rewriting is more of an art form. Which is more difficult, writing or rewriting? The answer is probably as simple as the fact that I see very few people rewriting anything, even when it's warranted by updated references.
Have you considered rewriting or rewriting and republishing your old blog articles? If not, why not?
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Good advice, RT. There's a few old ones I should grab from the dungeon, rewrite, then republish.
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I have not considered doing this before, but it is a good tip. I think it is important though that when you rewrite it that you do not change the post slug, right?
You can change the post slug as long as you redirect the URL with a 301 redirect. You can do it in the htaccess file or use a couple of different plugins for WordPress.
The main reason I don't rewrite is because there are too many things to write about in life and it seems a waste to time to go into something that I've already dwelt on in the past.
Besides, I'm not the 'editor' type, so I don't like touching something I've written a while ago.
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I don't know if I'm the "editor" type either, Hari. You may or may not have noticed, but I'm usually rewriting what are nothing more than journal-type entries from the first few months of the blog's history. I didn't put any effort into them the first time, so the second time should be a lot better.
Hari, you usually write something well enough the first time that it doesn't need to be rewritten, which tells me you've had a lot more practice than most people.
Though I'm flattered, to tell the truth, I do all the editing just before publishing and sometimes even after publishing.
But older articles I don't touch.
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I have recently started updating my previous posts that are based on the same concept as any of my new posts.
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There's nothing wrong with that at all. Your blog is fairly new.
I don't believe in rewriting articles. Although the articles are technically different, all the ideas are more or less the same.
but sometime after we read some article we can get a new idea..
go wtih rewrite
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I agree that editing a post can be more difficult than writing and publishing it the first time. I frequently find myself reading old posts and asking myself, "Did I write that?", sometimes because the post was so creative and thoughtful, other times because it was lame or my opinion had changed over time, with experience. Nonetheless it's interesting to reread old posts.
So, Scott, you still appear to be in the land of the living. Are you well yet?
Thanks for asking Richard. Yes the rumors that I am worm food, while partially true, are overstated. I've survived the attack of the germs and feel as though I may have beaten the little, microscopic warriors into submission. Their numbers were great but the power of chemical warfare (antibiotics) won out in the end. I love visiting your site and frequently learn something about life or the art of communication and blogging. Keep up the great work.
I'm waiting for you to get off your duff and start your own blog. I'm sure you'd get a ton of readers within 3 months.
But you must be careful.If you publish two or more links to content,google describes it as spam and you are banned from search engine
That's not true. Google disregards duplicate links and duplicate content, but doesn't ban you for it.
Rewriting an old blog post would be suitable for people who are too dumb, ignorant, uncreative or lazy to write a new blog post that they haven't posted before.
This is an excellent article for the unoriginal blogger who wants to try and make a quick dollar from advertisements and traffic.
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I think you just insulted me, but at least I'm not a "closet drag queen n00b".
Ah, quite the contrary, there was no insult in my comment. I was just being sarcastic, but I could see why you took it as an insult. Just thought I'd clarify that so there is no confusion of my intentions.
I'll save my insults for Youtube
My point is that it's kind of unoriginal to rewrite a blog post as opposed to writing a completely new, original and different blog post. It all depends on the reason you blog for (advertising, respect, visitors, comments..)
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