After blogging for a while you get increasingly bothered by all the outdated posts you have written years ago. Why?
Existing content needs to get fixed.
At the same time fresh content seems to be among the most popular ranking factors by now.
There must be an alternative to creating more noise in the name of fresh content SEO.
Yes! It exists! And it’s called evergreen content.
Find out how to create and maintain it below!
More content is not the only way, you can also reduce content decay!
Creating more content just for the sake of recency is not the only solution
Most website owners can’t create content on a regular basis and Google demotes AI slop!
What about all the valuable content you have created in the past?
Do we really need to “prune” content or in others words delete most of it?
How can we keep the effort required for updating as small as possible?
Broken links are just the most obvious issue.
It’s about downright content decay!
You can’t just get content out there and forget it anymore.
Sometimes what was right years ago is wrong by now.
Obsolete advice can even hurt your visitors and diminish your credibility.
Over the years I learned how to create evergreen content that doesn’t decay quickly in the first place.
What do I do differently now?
Content maintenance vs longevity
When I started writing this blog in 2007 I didn’t plan for the long term. All that counted was now.
It worked fine for a year or maybe even two.
Over the years legacy content means additional effort though.
Plus the risk of getting caught with spreading nonsense or linking out to corrupted sites grows.
I don’t have much time these days for tending my blog here.
Plus I also own other blogs and offer content writing for clients.
Over the years I also added outreach and offer social media management services. All of it takes time and effort every day.
At the end of the day there is not really enough time to fix and update the existing posts you have published.
I published five hundred articles here already. Yes, 500. No joke.
Yet I deleted dozens already because they were completely irrelevant by now.
It’s often a tedious process without much reward.
Some posts from years ago start ranking on Google again.
Yet most articles just remain hidden and get almost no traffic.
It’s pretty simple: nobody wants to tidy up their old dirty blog all day.
Even in case you have enough time it’s not always the best possible way to spend it.
After all don’t all these content marketers tell you to create fresh content as often as possible?
Restoring existing content is the probably least popular task out there. Many bloggers don’t do it at all. OK, long story short.
We have to find ways to make content less prone to decay over time.
Yes, it’s possible. I by now focus on evergreen content and links that can’t break too fast. How? Let me explain now.
One today but many yesterdays and tomorrows
Unless you’re part of a large organization you need to stop cover news. The problem with news is that they decay very fast.
Yesterday’s news is old already.
It’s rather “olds” not news if you know what I mean.
- Google has changed this
- Apple has introduced that
- the US president said this
- Lady Gaga sang that?
Today something is huge news, tomorrow just a footnote in a closed notebook lying in the attic.
Thus before each post ask yourself:
will this matter a year, 5 or 10 from now or will it just be history at best? Will it even matter in an archive?
Does it only matter for a few days at best?
In some niches it’s easier to ignore one-day wonders than in others.
When you’re dealing with technology you deal with fickle trends all the time.
You have often no idea whether “the next big thing” of now will exist at all next year.
There’s a partial solution for that too. I will explain later.
In other niches like self improvement/personal development you can write for eternity.
Spiritual enlightenment will be the same today and a millennium later.
Even cycling I deal with a lot is a better topic that search engine optimization for example.
Bikes that have been released 5 years ago still exist even in case they do not get sold anymore.
Bike enthusiasts often even focus on restoring older models.
The older the better in many cases.
Choose the topic of your post wisely. Will it be relevant in future too or just
- today
- this week
- for a month
at most?
Will it contain some actionable advice and some intrinsic wisdom?
Or will it be simply a description of outside events that may be completely off the radar soon?
Choose the first option ideally to prevent content rot for the long haul.
Linking out for long term integrity
As noted above broken links are the most obvious issue!
Outgoing links are needed to show you’re an authority.
Yet they age and break very quickly.
Broken links can be discovered easily with a WordPress extension called Broken Link Checker.
Rogue redirects or site changes are a bit more difficult to spot.
Often the link stays the same and the URL doesn’t even get redirected but you end up at a parked or worse hijacked domain.
It can be a spammer or even a criminal who owns a domain now.
Sometimes it’s just a case of someone else letting his site rot and get infested with malware.
You often can’t distinguish these links and have to check them manually.
Ideally you don’t link to one night stand website at all.
When you are dealing with “the next big thing” sites don’t link to them but to an article about them.
In the best case the article has been published on a site that has a proven track record of staying online for a few years.
The New York Times and TechCrunch exist for ages.
Some sites vanish quickly, others remain online for many years.
Yes, even Wikipedia might be a better choice than the latest start-up that will get acquired and “sunset” soon.
Startups may “pivot” or get out of business even sooner.
Thus choose publications that have a solid track record of staying online and keeping their links intact.
Even Google itself often breaks links in their documentation or other content.
Thus I rather link to search engine news sites like Search Engine Land.
Why not stop linking out altogether? Authority + tools!
Thus many site owners go the radical path and stop linking out together.
They don’t want to risk their site’s integrity.
Also many are afraid stale content might hurt them on Google for good reason!
So why not give up and stop linking out?
Outgoing links are a major ranking factor when assessing your overall website authority.
It’s not just about the links to sources! It’s about trust in general!
There is also a hard core technique to prevent link rot for the foreseeable future.
Saving the content of third party sites!
There are even tools for that.
Yet be cautious. Those services need to be stable enough themselves!
I’ve tried saving local copies of webpages using a third party service but then it went offline itself. Oh the irony!
So I tried a few over the years.
Here they are in no specific order:
Amber Link (WordPress plugin)
You can save and download a copy of each page you link out to using Amber Link.
When a third party page goes offline you can then link the local copy.
Sadly I had some technical issues with Amber and it hasn’t been updated since 2018. So I finally stopped using it.
Internet Archive (Archive.org website)
In other cases I have replaced the original links afterwards with link to the Internet Archive.
Archive.org is a great place to find by now offline pages and sites that’s been around for ages.
Rather it’s more specifically the Wayback Machine I refer to.
One of the default features of Broken Link Checker is to suggest the Wayback Machine version.
Sadly not all content is saved there.
Also the page load times are often very long. Linking out to Wayback Machine asks your user to wait too long.
Thus you need to take your own precautions.
Perma.cc (website)
Perma.cc is another tool to help you here. It creates a copy of the page you link in their archive on demand.
Sadly Perma.cc only offers 10 links to save in its free version.
Then you have to jump through additional hoops to get the service to save your linked pages.
Archive.is (Website plus Firefox Add-on)
Another web-based archive albeit in private hands is Archive.is/Archive.ph.
To add more confusion the site title says “archive.today” on top of that.
It offers both a form to save a page on their website and a browser extension (for Chrome, Edge, Firefox).
I tried to website and it works pretty neatly.
I haven’t tested the add-on yet so use at your own peril. It looks somehow legit but not really professional.
And you still have to link to the archived version manually then.
To link out or not is not the question!
Some people might still argue that to ensure integrity of your content for years you’d rather not link out at all.
It’s often the same people who remove comments from their blog. I finally did as well in 2024. Yet linking out is even more important!
Yes, you can set up a static site and just publish without linking out.
Then you won’t get the word out there in the first place.
Other publishers may notice you when you link to them!
Without user engagement a few years from now your “blog” probably won’t exist anymore at all.
No wo/man is an island without connecting with other bloggers and publishers you won’t succeed on the Web.
Unless of course you are already popular.
When the Web is just another channel or outlet for you and not a launchpad or starting point you may get away with it.
For most mere mortals like me and you we rely on other small websites, bloggers and editors to link to us!
Do images become obsolete too?
Imagery can also become dated.
Images are less prone to decay but still you need to update them for a variety of reasons.
There are all kinds of images:
- photos
- illustrations
- graphics
- charts
- infographics
- screen shots
etc.
Screen shots are often the most prone to decay.
When writing my SEO 2.0 ebook I added just a few of them.
Once I was finished with the text part of the book two years later most of the images were obsolete.
Google tools or features I pictured didn’t exist anymore or have been redesigned significantly ever since.
Do you need to avoid screen shots? It’s similar to links. Avoiding them altogether will make less successful in the first place.
You have to try to make screen shots as timeless as possible.
Screenshots only showing a particular feature may become outdated quickly.
Screen shots depicting a technique or strategy you use yourself are less time-sensitive.
Make sure they stay relevant even when the look and feel of the user interface has changed.
- Graphics
- charts
- and especially infographics
date pretty fast in the worst case.
A graphic unless it’s interactive only shows a particular snapshot in time.
The same applies to statistics. The most popular pop songs of 2007 do not matter that much anymore in 2027.
Unless you want to look at a snapshot of human history.
Be cautious with visualizing data when you’re creating content for longevity.
Yes, even photos get older
For example on my cycling blog I started out with images that 400 pixels wide.
Then – a few years later – I switched to a theme that allowed larger images – 500px – wide.
Now, another few years later, the standard images are 640px but I already see many sites showing 800px or 960px wide images.
The posts where the images were still the original 400px wide look like showing thumbnails that I forgot to make clickable.
What I’m doing now is looking up the source links and re-uploading the bigger images. Of course you could
upload the largest possible images from the start and let WordPress do the math itself.
Then you can only show the resized versions.
Do not put huge images on your blog and only resize the with HTML.
That will of course slow down your site significantly and cost you lots of visitors.
The image size is not the biggest problem.
Some photos, especially of people may be not true anymore.
People age over the years but also change hair styles or even genders.
Your five year old photo may be completely outdated by now.
When your blog post is saying something like “here’s the latest photo of x” you need to act.
Another major issue are Creative Commons licenses.
Many photographers give their images away at first just to change the license later on to good old copyright.
I’ve heard rumors that some “copyright holders” even use this bait and switch trick to rip off bloggers.
They simply claim that you breached their copyright and demand you to pay.
It’s not a myth. When updating posts I often encounter that issue.
Using your own images or buying them might be a better idea business-wise.
When your personal blogging budget is rather zero like mine you still rely on free photos though.
By now I mostly resort to using “free to use” images like the ones curated by Unsplash.
These are often very high quality images.
The number of photos there is limited though. You may find common motives all over the Web.
Dates are NOT always sweet
I love dates… and figs. They taste sweet and are very healthy.
Dates or lack there of on blog articles can pose a serious decay problem.
In the past I’ve been arguing that you need to remove dates from your articles. Why?
People will assume that even a few month old articles are outdated and bounce. That’s true to some extent but
when you create content for eternity you can’t remove dates completely. An article without a date can decay faster.
Let me explain: Would you read a post on how Obama just won the election and became the first “black” president in US history?
No, you automatically know that the article is obsolete and stop reading it.
When you notice the date though and decide to read the article despite it you assume that some data might be obsolete but may still matter.
Once you decide that the article is still relevant despite its age you ignore the outdated parts and focus on the timeless message.
Why do I use the Obama example again?
Well I’ve written three pieces “about him” back in 2008 but two of them are evergreen.
Why do they still matter? It’s because they deal with his online approach he used to win the election. The lessons are timeless.
Removing dates altogether is a mistake then. In the best case you would decide on an individual basis whether to add one or not.
I add a “last updated” date to my posts instead. Why?
Most articles have been updated significantly so that only showing the “original published date” would be misleading too.
When you have added substantial changes over time or during an update make sure to show the last updated date.
You may even flaunt it on top when its quite recent.
Many posts that get updated beyond some cosmetic changes often end up ranking higher on Google.
Even in case they don’t Google will show recent dates in search results so that search users are more likely to click those snippets.
Ideally you make your evergreen content as current as possible while at the core they stay evergreen.
In the best case the date is not the first thing you show on top.
I do at the bottom of the post. Google reads that date and show sit in their search results anyway.
Plus I show the last updated posts on top of the blog homepage automatically by now without actually republishing them as new in WordPress.
