Shelflife of a blog post SEO wise?

[sarenausa]

What is the shelflife of a blog post SEO wise and Google wise?

[EGOL]

The shelf life of a blog post is indefinite.

However, let's imagine how the value might diminish over time....

Let's say that the blog where the post is published has the ten most recent posts on its homepage, and each post is assigned to one category, and each category page displays ten posts.

When your blog post is brand new the page where it is displayed has one link into it from the homepage of the blog and one page into it from the main category page.  However, after many other posts are added the blog post no longer displays on the homepage and to find it in the homepage archive you must page back several pages.  The same is true for the category page.  After ten posts in that category it is getting buried in the pagination for that category.  So over time the links to your blog post page will be buried deeper and deeper in the pages of the blog and less linkvalue is passed.

[sferrino]

In regards to SEO I completely agree with EGOL, however there is something else you can do to continually get traffic to pages, and that is to use twitter and retweet your posts. If your posts are not specifically date based, and you can provide valuable information to people, it can work in your favor.

An example of someone doing this is @jeffbullas ,he uses SocialOomph to send out a tweet with an interesting title and link every 15 minutes. Some of them are a year old, but still have interesting, if not valuable, information.

[blu42media]

Steven - that's a great idea to recycle still-relevant posts.

Another idea, perhaps a way to handle more date-specific posts, would be a "Looking Back" type of callout on a page.  "Here's what we were talking about a year ago..." or five years, etc.

EGOL, you mentioned having 10 recent posts.  You could extend this out a little more and have another batch of ten that are related tags posts - even posts you set as specific that you'd like to renew again.

[eTundra]

A WordPress plugin I like a lot is Old Post Promoter  It allows you to set old posts in certain categories to automatically re-post as new at specified intervals.  I put all of my evergreen content in a special category in addition to its proper category and then let OPP automatically re-post that content every couple days.  Since I have my Twitter and Facebook feeds hooked up to my RSS, that old content also gets automatically re-posted there as well.

[Ticket_King]

I agree with John and Steven. We manage a number of sports blogs, and I have my content writers link back to old posts using new posts.  If there is a legitimate reason to link to the old post then go for it.  For a local music blog, I frequently write content that has no expiration date.  For example, I may post all summer about bands coming to town, or write reviews, but every few posts I might write a “top five music clubs in town” post. Those posts are relevant to my blog, they can be linked back to at a later date, and have the chance of picking up traffic at any time (depending on the search.)  Analytics will also tell you which posts are getting traffic, no matter how old the post may be.  That should give you a clue to what stays relevant.