AP 0666: Should I Update the Publish Dates on Old Posts on My Blog?

AskPat 666 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, everybody. Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 666 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a great question here from Andrea, but before we get to that I do want to thank today's sponsor which is FreshBooks.com. The most awesome company out there to help you manage you online business finances. Managing your books and your invoicing, they just make everything super simple. Especially if you're doing invoicing. So, if you bill anybody for anything, you're crazy not to use Fresh Books, because they … you can get it done in 30 seconds or less, and it gets sent over. It looks very professional looking. You can paid much quicker. It's just amazing, so if you want to check out FreshBooks for free for 30 days, all you have to do is go to freshbooks.com/askpat. Make sure you enter “AskPat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section.

All right, here is today's question from Andrea.

Andrea: Hi, Pat. It's Andrea from Bermuda. I'm a holistic nutritionist, and my website is goodhealthgirl.com. [Editor's note: This site is no longer active.] I listened to your SPI podcast last week about doing a content audit, and this is something I've been thinking about doing for a while and it needs to be done. Some of my previous blog posts are off brand or just not good or just something I don't even want on there anymore. So, when it comes to republishing some of the content, should I change the date to 2016 even if it was published in 2014. Not sure what to do about this. Also, I have a lot of seasonal posts on my blog like “healthy Super Bowl snacks” and “Christmas Brunch Recipes.” Are these things that should be on my site all the time? Or are seasonal posts … should they be taken down and put back up? I'm not sure what to do with them at all, or if I even want to do seasonal posts anymore. I'd really love your opinion on that. I love everything you do, Pat. It's been a real help. Love hearing all the success stories. Thank you.

Pat Flynn: What's up, Andrea! Thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. The episode that Andrea's talking about for everybody else out there who's listening is episode 200 of the Smart Passive Income podcast. You can find that at Smart Passive Income Podcast, session 200. This is where we had Todd Tresidder from financialmentor.com onboard to talk about the blog audit, and the best way to describe it is when you write your blog, it's just content you write over time. Over time you find that some of that content is just out of date or, like Andrea was saying, just shouldn't belong there. You would never publish a first draft of a book, would you? Well, we are all publishing the first drafts of our blog until we do a blog audit. Hopefully that analogy works, and it just puts it into perspective just how much we need to do this. A lot of people are seeing a lot of benefits SEO-wise, search engine optimization. They're getting higher rankings in Google. It's just a better experience for people on your website.

But the question here is, okay, “If you're updating an older post, what do you do with the publish date?” So, you go back into your archives, you find a post, and I would definitely recommend updating that post. Make it relevant, change any … if you hadn't had an editor on board back then, copy edit that post, make it great. You can add some time-related things based on what's happened since then. Then yes, I would absolutely change the publish date, because it is new. Yes, it's something you had published back then, but you are republishing it now. I recently did this for a post that was titled “The Most Important Conversation I've Ever Had About My Business Ever” or something like that. You may have read it on the blog. That was actually posted three years ago, I think, and it was reposted now. The cool thing is, nobody said anything. Not one person said anything about it coming back in terms of “Hey, you published this already. Why are you republishing it?” Nobody said that, because it was the date has changed. It becomes more relevant. People look often for the date on posts to see how relevant that content is. So, yeah, I would absolutely do that. I believe it also helps for search engine optimization, because Google wants to show the most relevant and timely information as well. So, yes, change the date for sure.

If you go into the archive and you find a post and you just want to republish but don't change anything, which I wouldn't recommend doing. I would always just make sure that those older posts are updated. But you could still do it if you wanted to. You could still change that publish date. I just always am wanting to be honest about it, though. That if anybody were to say anything, I think that's why nobody said anything, because actually at the beginning of that post I mentioned, “Hey, this was an older post but I've updated it and made it relevant plus it's something you need to see, and if you haven't seen it yet here it is again.” So, that's a great way to start the post and just knock out anybody who's gonna say anything about you just republishing it again or just changing the date.

Now, in terms of seasonal content. I think seasonal content is a very important. It's a way for you to stay on top of things. It's way for you to take advantage of some of the things that are happening in the world. So, the Super Bowl stuff and Christmas stuff, that's all great. That's super smart. I would keep that on our website even though it might not be relevant now. By the time those seasons come around, you're gonna have some great stuff that are gonna be very helpful to your audience. That stuff will be found in Google at the time that people are looking for it. So, even though those are going to be not read, they're gonna be in your archive, they're still relevant. They're just not relevant right now, but they will be relevant again later. One thing you would do to bring those posts back to life is not necessarily change the date on those pasts when those new seasons come, but I would do, for example, a round-up post. So, if the Super Bowl comes around next year, which of course it will, you might want to do a post, “Hey, here are my best Super Bowl recipes from the archive.” Then you can just list them all there and maybe include a few other ones, or, you know, just liking back to those old posts. I think that would work out really well.

So, Andrea, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. We're gonna send you an AskPat tee shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, here's what you gotta do. Just head on over to askpat.com. There's a record button right on that page. Hit the record button, ask your question. You can get featured here on the show just like Andrea and get a t-shirt free of charge. We're gonna send it to you no matter where in the world you are, unless you're like at the top of some mountain that nobody can get access to. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Thank you again to Fresh Books. If you want to check out FreshBooks for free for 30 days, go to freshbooks.com/askpat and don't forget make sure you enter “AskPat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section.

And finally as always, here's a quote. And this quote is from, well this quote is an Hasidic proverb, it's not a person saying it, it's just an Hasidic proverb. That quote is, sorry, “The man who has confidence in himself gains the confidence of others.” So it's when you believe that you can do it, other will believe in you too. Similar to a Henry Ford quote that I love which is, “Whether you think you can or you can't, you're right.” So, believe in yourself. Keep going.

Thanks so much. I appreciate you, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.