How to update an article without negatively impacting SEO?

Updating the content of a page is an excellent way to work on the natural referencing of a website.Where some are content to simply change the date of an article, others expand and update their text.

But then, who is wrong and who is right? And above all, what to do to update an article without negatively impacting SEO?

Does changing the date of an article have an impact on natural referencing?

If, currently, the fact of changing the date of an article with the aim of making it appear to be new content is not penalized by Google, Gary Illyes, trend analyst at Google is sounding the alarm: “Indeed, we let’s not penalize this practice today, but who knows what tomorrow will bring”.

But the worst according to him would be the attempt to cheat Internet users by passing off an old article for a new publication.

The risk would be to see the bounce rate increase if regular readers of a site decide not to stay on the page. And that negatively impacts the SEO of a website.

4 tips to improve SEO with content refresh

Less time-consuming than writing a new article, updating content has the primary advantage of providing relevant information to readers. Even when trying to write timeless content, there are a few areas that do not evolve.

If you want to improve the SEO of your site through article modifications, here are our tips:

1. Add an update date

“This content was updated on…”, a mention that can be found on many official sites and which is beginning to be seen more and more often on other blogs.

This method, which consists of refreshing a text that is more up-to-date or that contains errors, reassures the reader about the relevance of the information he is looking for. This is essential, especially if the text refers to laws, certain versions of software, or even in the case of a biography of a living personality. In fact, any blog post that deals with an evolving topic should be updated.

For very old articles, the solution may be to keep the title, for example, “Optimize its referencing with the content update”, to keep the URL and to completely change the text so that it meets the recommendations currently in force.

2. Turn Small Blog Posts Into One Guide

The idea here is to send a strong signal to Google by rewriting an old article and augmenting it with all the information contained in other articles on the site that deal with the same subject.

Once the guide is created, all you have to do is create a 301 redirect from the old articles to the new ones.

3. Create newsfeed-style posts

Some subjects lend themselves particularly well to this practice. These are all articles that mention results or relate to the evolution of an event.

For example, a sports blog that communicates the results of swimming races at the Olympic Games can, rather than creating one page per race, adopt the system of continuous article updates. The last result would be positioned at the top of the page to launch a strong update signal.

4. Update an article on a new page

If you want to publish new content, there is still the possibility of creating a new article that will serve as an update of an old article.

The technique consists of rewriting the old content by removing the elements that are no longer relevant and adding the new ones. To prevent the site from being penalized for duplicate content, it is advisable in the event of a partial rewrite, to create a canonical URL for this new page. Read also:  7 tips for writing the content of your chatbot well

In all cases, the content update should aim to be useful to readers.

It should also be remembered that a site that provides outdated information is very likely to lose its authority with readers.

If a page is not updated, deleting it is an option that would allow the site to maintain a good image with Internet users and therefore have a positive impact on its natural referencing.