Updating Old Content at Scale - Any Danger from a Google Penalty/Spam Perspective?

[paulz999]

We've read a lot about the power of updating old content (making it more relevant for today, finding other ways to add value to it) and republishing (Here I mean changing the publish date from the original publish date to today's date - not publishing on other sites).

I'm wondering if there is any danger of doing this at scale (designating a few months out of the year where we don't publish brand-new content but instead focus on taking our old blog posts, updating them, and changing the publish date - ~15 posts/month). We have a huge archive of old posts we believe we can add value to and publish anew to benefit our community/organic traffic visitors.

It seems like we could add a lot of value to readers by doing this, but I'm a little worried this might somehow be seen by Google as manipulative/spammy/something that could otherwise get us in trouble.

Does anyone have experience doing this or have thoughts on whether this might somehow be dangerous to do?

Thanks Moz community!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

You'll probably experience a dip from not publishing new content but I don't believe there will be any other issues.

Updating old content (drip fed or in bulk) won't trigger any spam/manipulation flags.

[CleverPhD]

We have actually been doing this on one of our sites where we have several thousand articles going all the way back to the late 90s.  Here is what we do / our process (I am not including how to select articles here, just what to do once they are selected).

1. Really take the time to update the article. Ask the questions, "How can we improve it? Can we give better information? Better graphics?  Better references? Can we improve conversion?"  2) Republish with a new date on the page.  Sometimes add an editor's note on how this is an updated version of the older article.  3) Keep the same URL to preserve link equity etc or 301 to new url if needed 4) mix these in with new articles as a part of our publication schedule.

We have done this for years and have not run into issues. I do not think Google sees this as spammy as long as you are really taking the time to improve your articles. John M. and Gary I. have stated unequivocally that Google likes it when you improve your content. We have done the above, it has not been dangerous at all. Our content is better overall. In some cases where we really focused on conversion, we not only got more traffic, but converted better. Doing this will only benefit your visitors, which usually translates into Google liking the result.

I would ask, why take a few months where you only recycle content, to just mixing it up all year long?  If you were going to designate 3 months of the year to just update content, then why not take the 3rd week of the month each month or every Wednesday and do the same thing instead.  You accomplish the same thing, but spread it out. Make it a feature! Flashback Friday etc.

Bonus idea - make sure you get the schema right

We have something new with our process. Previously, we only marked up the publication date in schema. So when we republished, we would change the publication date in the schema as well to the new pub date.  Now that Google requires a pub date and last modified date in schema we have changed our process. When we republish content, we will leave the original publication date as the publication date marked up in schema and then put the new date that the article is being published marked up as last modified in schema. This is a much more clearer and accurate representation to Google as what you are doing with the article.

We are also displaying the last modified date to the user as the primary date, with the publication date made secondary. The intent here is that we want to show that this is an article that has been recently updated to the user so they know the information is current.

To get this to work properly, we had to rework how our CMS interacts with content on both published date and last modified date, but in the end, I think we are giving better signals to Google and users on the statuses of our articles.

[paulz999]

Awesome, thank you so much for the detailed response and ideas - this all makes a good deal of sense and we really appreciate it!