Updating an Old Post Instead of Writing a New One

The instinct is always to add

Publishing feels like progress in a way that revising does not.

A new post is visible: something exists that did not exist this morning. An improved page looks exactly like the page did yesterday, and nobody congratulates anybody for it.

So the default is to write alongside what you have, and after three years a site carries four overlapping pages on its most important subject, none of which is the good one.

What an old page already has

Things a new page starts with none of.

An address that has been in the index long enough to have a settled position.

Whatever links have accumulated to it, from your own pages and from anywhere else.

A record of the searches that have brought people to it, which tells you what it is actually being found for.

And, if it has been there a while, the credit that comes from having been a stable answer at one address rather than a new one making a claim.

A new page competing on the same subject begins at zero against all four, and its most likely competitor is the old page.

When updating is the right call

• The subject is the same and only the details have moved.
• The page ranks but for the wrong phrasing.
• It is thin and the topic deserves more.
• Something in it is now wrong, which is urgent regardless.
• You know more than you did when you wrote it.

The second is the most commonly missed. A page attracting the wrong searches is usually not a new-page problem, it is a wording problem in the page you have.

When a new page is right

When the subject is genuinely different rather than adjacent.

The test is whether somebody searching for the new thing would be satisfied landing on the old page. If they would, it is an update. If they would not, it is a new page.

Also when the old page is well built around a specific question and the new material would distort it, in which case you write separately and link the two.

What is not a reason is that the old page is old, or that a schedule requires something new this month.

What updating actually means

Not changing the date and adding a paragraph, which is the version most businesses do and which achieves close to nothing.

Reread it as though somebody else wrote it. Correct anything untrue. Add what you have learned since. Cut what has stopped being relevant. Rewrite the opening, which is usually the weakest part of anything written a few years ago.

Add the sections that answer the follow-up questions you now know people have, because you have been asked them since publishing.

If the result is not meaningfully better as a document, nothing has been updated regardless of what the date says.

Keep the address

This is the part that makes the whole exercise worthwhile, and it is easy to lose by accident.

The page keeps its address. Not a new one with the year in it, not a fresh post that redirects the old one, and not a duplicate published as new.

Same address, better content. Everything the page had accumulated stays attached to it.

If your system creates a new address when a title changes, either leave the address alone while changing the visible title, or accept the change and redirect properly.

A worked example

A supplier had three pages about the same product category, written in 2017, 2018, and 2020.

The 2017 page had almost all the traffic and was the worst of the three, having been written before they properly understood what customers asked.

The two newer ones were better written and nearly invisible.

They rebuilt the 2017 page at its original address, taking the strongest material from all three, adding four sections answering questions that had come up since, and correcting two things that had become wrong.

The two newer pages were merged into it and redirected.

Traffic to that address rose by roughly half over four months, and, more usefully, the enquiries stopped opening with questions the page now answered.

The site went from three mediocre pages to one good one, which is a smaller site and a better one.

The date question

Whether to change the visible date on a substantially revised page is a genuine question with no universal answer.

Changing it after a real rewrite is honest and helps readers judge whether the information is current, which matters most in fields that move.

Changing it after a cosmetic edit is a small deception, and readers who return and find nothing different notice.

The approach that avoids the problem is showing both: originally published, last updated. It is accurate, it is more informative than either alone, and it removes the temptation to touch a page purely to refresh a date.

Finding the candidates

Two lists, and the overlap between them is where the work is.

From your search console, the pages receiving impressions but few clicks, which are being shown and not chosen, usually because the wording does not match what was searched.

From your own knowledge, the pages you know are wrong or thin, which you can list from memory in about ten minutes.

Then check for subjects covered more than once, since those are the highest-value cases: an update plus a merge rather than an update alone.

The counter-case

Updating can be overdone, and there are two failure modes.

The first is endlessly revising the same few pages while never covering anything new, which is comfortable and leaves the site narrow.

The second is updating a page that was fine, because a report suggested it. Not every page needs to grow, and adding sections to a page that answered its question well makes it worse.

There is also genuine value in a dated record. A piece written about a specific moment should stay as it was, with a note if the position has since changed, rather than being quietly rewritten into a claim it never made.

The procedure

1. List pages that are wrong, thin, or shown without being clicked.
2. Check for duplicate subjects across the site.
3. Pick the strongest address as the one that survives.
4. Rewrite properly, not cosmetically.
5. Merge and redirect the weaker versions.
6. Show published and updated dates.
7. Count it as that month's publishing.

The last step is the one that makes this happen at all, because otherwise it never competes with writing something new.

Rewriting something genuinely old is covered in rewriting a page three years old.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.