What Are The Pros and Cons of Writing About the Same Topic Several Times?

[GreatLegalMarketing]

I am working on a website that has been publishing content for years. Some of the content is 6 or 7 years old! Daily, I am re-writing, updating, or deleting old content, and adding new content.

We have covered every topic under the sun (within our niche market), and sometimes new content is similar to old content in some way. Or, we are answering the same question a dozen different ways.

I have always assumed this was correct for SEO, but I was challenged on this notion today and now I am questioning the practice of writing content that could be the same (or similar) as the old content we have written.

What are the pros and content of creating "duplicate" content, provided it is never an exact carbon copy of our older content.

[Dalessi]

Hello,

People and Google love freshly updated content. For example, if you were writing about computers and the best gaming notebooks. If your last article was two years ago things could be completely different now. Now, this may not be pertinent for a person who writes blogs on food and cake recipes because things may not change much over time, but in other areas like technology, sports, or many other topics current content is critical.

[brooksmanley]

I would agree with you, there are pros and cons.

One site I keep up with almost religiously is backlinko.com. Brian Dean is a popular SEO thought leader. If you checkout his post sitemap, you'll see he only has around 30 posts - one on just about every topic. You'll find that each post wholly answers his users' questions, with examples, further resources, media, and more.

In my opinion, this is the direction the internet is heading. One exhaustive post on a popular topic in your industry, updated yearly, is going to outperform (in terms of overall traffic and individual ranking) 4-5 posts on one single topic.

So, the pros of lots of posts on one topic might be the potential of having multiple, specific long tail keywords rank and the opportunity to have a specific and quick answer to multiple searchers' queries. But the big con is that none of those posts will have a great chance of ranking well for a high volume keyword.

Hope this helps!