Old blog posts? The silent blog killer.

We talk about a lot of blog topics around here. How to write great posts, how to write compelling titles and how to deal with Search Engine Optimization issues. There is one thing that is often overlooked, old blog posts.

Search engines never forget. If your blog post already has a good bit of traction you could stay highly ranked for a topic for ages. Take a look at my traffic example:

Top Blog Posts 10/19/2009 – 10/26/2009

• 2/19/08 Holy World of Warcraft Batman, 64-bit WoW 596 views
• 1/11/09 Is Windows 7’s Aero Peek a copy of Apple’s Expose 519 views
• 6/25/07 TVersity, PS3 Perfect Streaming Media Player 427 views
• 1/28/07 World of Warcraft, Poor Frame Rates on Vista 294 views
• 5/18/09 How to make a bootable Windows 7 Install Flash Drive 202 views

That is pretty interesting. For the last week, 3 out of the 5 most popular posts on my blogs were written before 2009, a year that is nearly over. Several are a few years old and still getting hundreds of page views a week.

What Does This Mean?

It actually means a few things. Without pandering, these are probably topics you should be writing about more, and linking to through updates to these posts. They obviously have the “Google Juice” so to speak, so why not take advantage of it.

Second is the less obvious, update these posts! Information changes, blogs are live and dynamic, do not write and forget. These posts have the potential to hurt your blog if you do not keep them current. Google and Bing are telling these people that you are an authority on this subject. Several years is a very long time to let technology information sit still. If the user reads your posts and finds the information to be irrelevant or even worse inaccurate, that hurts your reputation.

Use Them or Lose Them

Obviously my first advice is to update these posts and get the maximum value out of them. The last advice is that if you can’t or don’t want to, get rid of them. Make sure you have a compelling 404 page, preferably one that searches your blog for articles related to the query term, and try to convert that user to a reader.

As a blogger, your credibility is the only thing you have. Bad articles and inaccurate information will turn that 30 second page view away. Good information and quality content will turn that same fly by into a subscriber. Don’t let these old posts kill you. Use Google Analytics, keep track of which old posts are being regularly visited, visit them yourself, and make sure they still stand up several years later.

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