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?
