Rewriting Old Posts

[LeeLee]

I think this is the best area of the forum to ask this question. I have a blog that is several years old. It gets decent traffic and modest earnings. The blog was being written by someone else, and not well written. I am taking over the blog and will be writing fresh content going forward.

Here is my question. Can I rewrite the old, bad content? What effect will this have on SEO? Will the rewritten articles negate the age of the blog?

Does it make a difference if I merely "correct" a post versus replacing the post with something completely different?

I guess that was more than one question. Please help.

[Melissa82]

You might as well redo the whole thing if you have the time. If you have done your SEO research you should see some glaring mistakes with meta, title and keyword content inclusion. Do it correctly it will have a positive affect on your SE results.

[LeeLee]

I'm sorry Melissa. I really don't understand your answer.

Anyone?

[milapetersburg]

Hi LeeLee,

I see that you want to make your blog better in terms of contents served to users. But I am afraid it will affect long tail rankings especially when you totally replace the poorly written content to a new one. As you know, spiders do factor the words in the copy, where they are located, and how they are presented. Thus, changing the content of the page may also change the way spiders categorize, rate and rank it on results pages.

Can you rewrite bad content? yes, of course, please, there are millions of blogs with poor content already, so it's a recommendation way to separate your blog from those. Will the changes affect the current statistics of your site? Yes, temporarily. As you aim to build a better blog, you may experience shakes, but that'll be temporary as spiders analyze your blog's contents again. In the long run, this is a very vital move.

[Melissa82]

I'm just talking about the basics of SEO. Your meta keywords, your meta title and description, the H1 heading in your blog article and the placement of your keywords in your article. All of these should be cohesive on whatever keywords(s) you are targeting.

The purpose of this is to rise up in the SE rankings. If you want check out my link you will see what I mean. Go to my site and you will se that I have done my best to optimize for "buy proxies". Hit ctl + u once on the page to see the page source so you can see the meta tags.

I'm no expert in SEO but I do know the basics well enough. Once you know what I'm talking about go to your blog and see how it has been optimized. If the basics are not there then it will benefit you to do a revision.

Hope that helps.

[LeeLee]

Originally Posted by Melissa82

I'm just talking about the basics of SEO. Your meta keywords, your meta title and description, the H1 heading in your blog article and the placement of your keywords in your article. All of these should be cohesive on whatever keywords(s) you are targeting.

The purpose of this is to rise up in the SE rankings. If you want check out my link you will see what I mean. Go to my site and you will se that I have done my best to optimize for "buy proxies". Hit ctl + u once on the page to see the page source so you can see the meta tags.

I'm no expert in SEO but I do know the basics well enough. Once you know what I'm talking about go to your blog and see how it has been optimized. If the basics are not there then it will benefit you to do a revision.

Hope that helps.

I do know what you are talking about, thanks.

[LeeLee]

Originally Posted by milapetersburg

Hi LeeLee,

I see that you want to make your blog better in terms of contents served to users. But I am afraid it will affect long tail rankings especially when you totally replace the poorly written content to a new one. As you know, spiders do factor the words in the copy, where they are located, and how they are presented. Thus, changing the content of the page may also change the way to categorize, rate and rank it on results pages.

Can you rewrite bad content? yes, of course, please, there are millions of blogs with poor content already, so it's a recommendation way to separate your blog from those. Will the changes affect the current statistics of your site? Yes, temporarily. As you aim to build a better blog, you may experience shakes, but that'll be temporary as spiders analyze your blog's contents again. In the long run, this is a very vital move.

Yes that is what I was getting at. I didn't know the spiders would factor the exact placement of the words. I only know the algorithms are getting more sophisticated every day. I could easily rewrite the content to be better, especially grammatically, without doing major overhauls. I think that is what I will do.

I agree about looking at the long run. I get decent traffic now but I am not sure how I would do with a manual evaluation. And yes, there is way to much junk on the net now. I'm not sure how many posts I have on the site. I would estimate about 2,000.

So going forward I will be adding new, better content and I will start to "correct" the junky posts a few at a time. Maybe if I take the corrections slow, I can avoid any major shakeups.

[David Ogden]

What I would suggest, is to leave the posts as they are but start adding new posts rewriting the contents of the older posts to provide improved keyword content Not many people actually read old blog posts unless they follow a link from a search. You blog will then start looking the way you want it to. This is much better strategy than correcting the old posts.

[LeeLee]

Originally Posted by David Ogden

What I would suggest, is to leave the posts as they are but start adding new posts rewriting the contents of the older posts to provide improved keyword content Not many people actually read old blog posts unless they follow a link from a search. You blog will then start looking the way you want it to. This is much better strategy than correcting the old posts.

The majority of my traffic is from search engines so my older posts do get action and I actually have some good positioning on some posts. I guess I should specify what I am hoping to achieve.

I want to keep people on page longer and lower bounce rate. Believe me, if I struggled to read through a grammatically bad post, I would bounce away, too. I am amazed the blog has done as well as it has. That is probably why I let this neglect go on so long.

Also beyond the bounce rate and the time on page, I want the blog to be well received should it get a manual review.

As far as rewriting posts to use as new posts, I could do that but I am planning to focus more on other topics (still germaine to the blog).

I'm just trying to make sure I am not doing more harm than good. I tried doing research on this subject but didn't come up with much. That is why I was hoping some of the Warriors might know if I am heading in the right direction.

[cfl]

I suggest to write fresh Unique articles