Content development is one of the most important issues when it comes to both a website or blog. We often heard that content is king; content needs to be unique; content should be written for users, not search engines; I could go on. I think you get the message, content is important. What happens when your content becomes out of date?

Having content that is out of date can hurt your reputation. Users find your pages in the search results, however on arrival they find the information either out of date or now irrelevant. You have a number of choices.

1. Re-write the original content. For web pages you could re-write the original with corrections to make it up to date. For blogs, you could go back and edit the original post. This is the least preferred method as the old information still has archive value. You are looking to increase the amount of content, not decrease it.
2. Create new content. Creating new content makes sense, however the old content is still there and receiving traffic. There are several options to deal with this issue:

• You could redirect to the new content using redirects.
• You could hijack the URL by renaming the old content to a new URL and using the old URL for the new content. The new content would then need a link to the old content.
• You could signpost the old content with links leading to the new content. This is possibly the best option as the old content retains its place in the search results and indexes whilst feeding link juice to the new content.

There are always to get around problems with out of date content. The important task is to ensure that visitors can easily find the new content when they need too.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Content Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.