Work Smarter not Harder: Why and When to Refresh and Republish Content!

• We have been optimizing and re-sharing old blogs posts on our client sites. We've been told that this is a good way to introduce the content to a new audience and that there are clear benefits with Google if we do this. Is that correct? And, if we were to change the date of publishing on the posts in order to bring them to the top of our feed, would this have any negative SEO impacts?

Answer: Short answer is no; it would not have a negative effect. Refreshing old content is ALWAYS a good idea!

The biggest issue is this: WILL THE URL CHANGE if you update and republish? Hopefully, you have a flat URL structure that doesn't contain dates. By doing so, you can update your best content (ie, you change the pictures, research and update the post with new information, improve overall UX), but publish at the SAME URL.

You want this: yoursite.com/sample-blog-post/

And not this: yoursite.com/month/day/year/sample-blog-post

Doing this is clearly very important for SEO purposes:

• 1. You don't "break" URLs by updating a URL that contains a previous date to one that is now current - creating TWO separate URLs in the process.
• 2. You allow the earned authority of the post to stay intact while also republishing and generating new "pings" to Google to take advantage of Freshness boosts.

The...