Republish An Updated Blog or not?

[KempRugeLawGroup]

We need to update one of our older posts (a new federal ruling came down that now applies) but do I just update it or should I republish it? I know that just republishing something that hasn't been changed, can get you  flagged, but if it's an update, I would think that would be appropriate to republish. I'd just like some guidance before I proceed.

Thanks and Happy Friday!

Ruben

[EGOL]

I spend about 1/3 of my time improving the content on a long-established site.   Articles are made current, more substantive, new data, updated graphs , additional Images.

I often see an almost immediate improvement in rankings.

These are not just tweaks to a few sentences.  They are major rewrites.  An article of 1000 words and three images might get a new introduction that hits topics in the news and two or three new subheadings and two additional images and an updated data table.

Rankings can go up within a couple of weeks.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Thanks Patrick, I appreciate it.

[WhiteboardCreations]

Hi Ruben! And Happy Friday to you, too!

It's never a bad idea to republish or update a blog post. We done it before and not really seen any adverse affects to anything we are doing. Before we went through that process (and before we had a Moz account) we hit the search engines and read articles about how to handle old content or to add to older posts.

As some references and reading enjoyment, take a look at Hubspot's post here "The Complete Guide to Updating and Republishing Outdated Blog Content" and also Entrepreneur.com had a recent article I bookmarked on this subject a couple months ago, "Your Blog's Secret Weapon: Old Content". As many industries change, so will the content, so going back to republish or update an article is a wise decision to keep your content as relevant as possible AND with Google being keen on displaying the best results, your old content won't have a chance if the information isn't accurate to the times.

Hope this was helpful! Cheers - Patrick