Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What Are The Pros and Cons of Writing About the Same Topic Several Times?
-
I am working on a website that has been publishing content for years. Some of the content is 6 or 7 years old! Daily, I am re-writing, updating, or deleting old content, and adding new content.
We have covered every topic under the sun (within our niche market), and sometimes new content is similar to old content in some way. Or, we are answering the same question a dozen different ways.
I have always assumed this was correct for SEO, but I was challenged on this notion today and now I am questioning the practice of writing content that could be the same (or similar) as the old content we have written.
What are the pros and content of creating "duplicate" content, provided it is never an exact carbon copy of our older content.
-
I would agree with you, there are pros and cons.
One site I keep up with almost religiously is backlinko.com. Brian Dean is a popular SEO thought leader. If you checkout his post sitemap, you'll see he only has around 30 posts - one on just about every topic. You'll find that each post wholly answers his users' questions, with examples, further resources, media, and more.
In my opinion, this is the direction the internet is heading. One exhaustive post on a popular topic in your industry, updated yearly, is going to outperform (in terms of overall traffic and individual ranking) 4-5 posts on one single topic.
So, the pros of lots of posts on one topic might be the potential of having multiple, specific long tail keywords rank and the opportunity to have a specific and quick answer to multiple searchers' queries. But the big con is that none of those posts will have a great chance of ranking well for a high volume keyword.
Hope this helps!
-
Hello,
People and Google love freshly updated content. For example, if you were writing about computers and the best gaming notebooks. If your last article was two years ago things could be completely different now. Now, this may not be pertinent for a person who writes blogs on food and cake recipes because things may not change much over time, but in other areas like technology, sports, or many other topics current content is critical.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Write new articles or republish old ones?
Hi,
Content Development | | Enrico_Cassinelli
we run a tourism information website about a region in italy, and each year, during special occasions such as christmas, easter and so on we publish an article with a "what to do on Christmas / Easter / .... in the Langhe" (collecting events, activities, etc.). Is it better to "reuse" the old articles and change only the year in the title and of course the content (providing that we are gonna keep the URL without year), or to publish a new one? thanks!0 -
When to re-write and redirect a blog url?
What are best practices for rewriting (and then redirecting) blog URLs? I refresh old blog posts on our blog every month and many of them have URLs that are too long or could be improved. However, many of them also already get decent organic traffic and I don't want to lose traffic due to a URL redirect. Are there any best practices or "rules" I can follow when deciding whether to re-write and redirect blog URLs?
Content Development | | Emily.R.Monrovia
Thanks!0 -
Best Practices for Recurring Blog Topics
Our site has annual articles (such as a payment calendar and an announcement of our annual conference). Is it better to keep all the old blog articles available and searchable, redirect them to the most current year's entry, or something else entirely? My instinct is to have a permanent redirect to the newest article.
Content Development | | GwenKestrel1 -
Write post in Moz. How can we apply to send a post, is this posible?
Hi, is posible to colaborate in MOZ post, i´m spanish i so probably i had to check muy post lots lots of times, but is it posible? Thanks
Content Development | | Agenciaseomadrid1 -
Content Writing - it should be for the main corporate site, blog or for social media?
Hi There, I have my main site : example.com and a related blog https://blog.example.com/ My management does not believe frequent content posting on the example.com My Queries 1- Will it help boost ranking of **example.com **if we share frequent content on our blog https://blog.example.com/? How much impact it has? 2- Every body says content is the king, Ok fine, but when you are not allowed to share it on the main corporate site, then where to share it? Blog and social media sites? please help. 3- We are in a business where clients do not bother to go on sites and read, so in this scenario is it correct to say that you hav to create the content for search engine consumption even when your clients dont need it/or have not in the habit of reading it? Hope somebody will enligten me caught in catch 22. Regards Tanveer
Content Development | | Sequelmed1 -
Best Websites to help discover Topics
Hi I know I can use Twitter and latest posts on Google & Blogs, but I was wondering what are the best tools at the moment to use if you are looking to write about up to the minute information about a certain topic. Say the topic is London, is there a website or tag cloud to understand what people are saying about London right now? Anything better than Social Mention?
Content Development | | xoffie0 -
Should I publish several blog posts at once or stagger?
I have several blog posts that I want to publish (40 or so). For freshness is it better to stagger their publication over several months or is it fine to publish them all at the same time. The comments are closed.
Content Development | | AndreB0 -
How many pages is too many to add to a site at one time?
I have quite a bit of excellent content articles at my disposal and we would like to increase the number of pages on our site. I could, theoretically add 100's of pages at a time. Does anyone have a good sense of how much content added to a sight in mass looks bad to Google? My plan is to add approximately 50 pages a week to our site, which already has 4000 pages of content. This is relevant content, since we are a custom writing service and all topics are covered. Our content is what gives us great organic hits and orders. However, I would like to add more than 50 a week...how many is too many? Thanks and I appreciate thoughts and feedback! Karen
Content Development | | eworld0