To republish or not to republish blog posts?

The short answer, YES! Whether you're continuing the success of a previous post or improving on what you've written before, republishing is something that should always be on your digital marketing to-do list. And what's more, Google will actually reward your website ratings for doing it! We’ve listed the best ways to repurpose and republish old or outdated blog articles in order to maximize SEO, avoid any duplicate content SEO penalties, maintain inbound links and give your valuable older blogs a new life.

Why republishing blogs matters

Republishing old blogs takes less effort than writing a new one. Not updating posts can affect your brands reputation. Many high-ranking blog posts tend to be older ones, and if someone clicks on one without paying attention to the date, they may think they are reading new data, when it’s actually old news. Not good. If the data has changed or no longer apply, you should at least update facts for the sake of the reader and your reputation.

Steps to Follow to Republish Blog Posts

To successfully republish blog posts, you need to know how to do it correctly. Otherwise you risk penalties, loss of inbound links and more. Here's our simple step by step guide:-

1) Research

Use a tool like Google Analytics to determine your top performing posts.

2) Keep the same URL

If an external website or social media comment refers to your old post URL and you have changed the URL of that old post, you will lose all that referral traffic. Instead, anytime someone wants to visit your post from that link, they will see a 404 page – “Page not found.” Also if you publish the post with a different URL, it may be considered duplicate content. Search engines will see two separate pages with almost the same words on each. “Can’t I just set up redirects to get around this issue?” Google doesn’t necessarily value a URL that redirects to another, so you may lose that page rank from the old URL.

3) Keywords

If you have to alter your blogs title for relevancy’s sake, make sure you are using the same keywords.

4) Keep content fresh

Go through your old post and edit out anything that is no longer up-to-date or accurate, including stats, links, and advice. It is okay to keep some of the text since you are completely replacing the old blog, just make sure it still applies.

5) Update readers

You can do this by adding an author’s note at the end of the post so your readers aren’t left thinking, “Didn’t I already read this?”

6) Check meta details

Check the meta description to ensure it is still applicable to the updated content, then update the date to the current one, and publish.

When republishing blog posts it's also worth noting...

Some readers copy and paste content they find to their own blogs. Google should recognise that your article was the ‘original’. But when you update the date, and repost your blog, Google may think your post is now the copy. It is always worth checking there are no earlier posts out there before you continue.
Automatic social media shares may not work from certain Content Management Systems. This will have to be done manually.
Make sure you provide new content more than republished content. Otherwise your reader figures will drop.

Getting a blog right, will not only save time, but help to improve your websites Google rankings and keep traffic returning to your site. For help optimising your current content for search engines and creating a blog content marketing strategy, contact our friendly team on 01724 376002 or email hello@res.digital