Updating old blog posts in Wordpress to appear more recent?

[dchristensen3]

I'm doing work for a law firm that has a lot of blog post content from 2010-2011 ranking for long-term keywords. These pages are displaying date snippets in SERPs, but because legal information can change year to year, I don't want the content to appear as though it's 2-3 years old.

The date of the post is in the URL structure, so I can't change the publication date w/o changing the URL. So my question is twofold: is there a way to show an updated date snippet in search results, or block the date snippet from showing, even if the date is in the URL?

Or are there other options - creating pages for each of these posts and 301ing them to the page that has a cleaner URL, etc.?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[DennisSeymour]

if you think you think you can add more to the topic, then just update it. If the content is very good and has been driving consistent traffic for a long time, i would make it to a static page (same permalinks) then make sure it's very visible throughout the site.

[ReferralCandy]

If I may suggest, start with stripping the date from your URLs and 301 redirect them to the updated URL.

As for your content, ensure you have headings such as "The definite guide to ..." / "The 2013 guide to ..." to signal to visitors that your content is updated. You can also try " ... (Updated Aug 2013)" in your header. Updates should be summarised and listed on the top of your posts so that visitors immediately know that your content has been regularly updated.

With that, the date snippets in SERPs will not appear to be old, and may in fact help to establish the authority of your post, since the post has been created a few years ago and has been regularly updated.

[dchristensen3]

Hey Ron, thanks for the feedback, I'll definitely look into setting up new content that way, seems like a logical organization. I appreciate the help!

[dchristensen3]

Mike, looking over my question, I failed to mention that I have updated all these blog posts in the last two months. So for instance, on the sitemap, it says that these certain posts were last modified in July or August.

I'm not concerned with Google - it sees the updates in the sitemap. What I am concerned with is that the user doesn't see the sitemap modifications, so to them, the content still appears a few years old, when really it's been updated recently. I've added "Updated On..." tags here and there, so I'm not trying to play any games w/ the dates, just trying to show users that these pages have been updated.

[Ron_McCabe]

Dustin,

I would not try to game the system in this way as you may have unexpected side effects and actually hurt your rankings. Instead I would look at these subjects and ask the firm if there have been changes or updates relative to these posts.  Where there have been changes I would suggest you evaluate the value for each post based on possible revenue if they get a client, search volume and how this positions them against their competitors.  I would prioritize this updated content based on this.

I would add in a plug in that shows all the blogs on a subject and sorts them by date.  This way you may be able to simply write an update blog and then refer to the previous blog (the prize you should go for is to get comments on both ).  If the changes are significant enough I would write a new blog on the subject.

On all the blogs that are out of date I would have someone go in and add a comment in this regard with a reference to the update.

On the blogs that are older and not out of date I would add an amended post simply stating that the blog has been reviewed and that the information is still relevant.

This is not the only way to do things but my experience is that this more labor intensive approach that creates content is always the best approach.  With this approach my clients had an average of 45% traffic growth last year while increasing their conversion rate.

Let me know if you have any additional questions,

Ron

[MikeRoberts]

For the most part, trying to re-post your old content with a newer date in order to make it seem fresh when it isn't is really just an attempt to game the system. It may work somewhat in the short-term but its not a good long-term strategy. New, unique and relevant content would always be better.

[dchristensen3]

Hey Mike, thanks for the response. That's my strategy with most of the old content on the site. But there are a handful of  posts that have some good links and age behind them and I figured it would be more effective to update those than to create a new page to replace them. I'm tracking the content I have replaced, though, so I'll be able to see if that's been effective so far.

[MikeRoberts]

Why not write new content about the same topic but from a more current viewpoint including any changes to the law and/or info on recent, publicly available cases that are related to that law?