Content Rejuvenation

Content rejuvenation describes the process of further development of existing content on your website, specifically targeting pages which are already popular in search engines. The idea is to maximise the benefits to your authorship and the website you write for.

Today I had a look at my author stats in Google Webmaster Tools and found some ordinary pages doing surprising well in search.

Not all of my posts are of the highest possible quality. Often I drop a post that’s just a simple observation or an invitation to join me for a hangout or survey. One tip I wrote about doesn’t even work anymore (YouTube Subscriber Hack).

It may all appear fine in Google Analytics, but the only way to find out if your content is embarrassing is to open it up and read it.

The notion of content rejuvenation is in my case driven by the following incentives:

1. Minimise bounces by creating additional highly engaging content enriching and adding value to what’s already there.
2. Improved content is more likely to be referenced, shared and linked.
3. Maintain a high quality content association with my author profile.

Outdated Content

When users land on your article, they won’t necessarily look for a date but will instead focus on reading the content to see if the piece contains answers to their questions. Are your statements a 2006 article still valid?

Poor Format

Poor content structure including lack of headings, sub headings, imagery, illustrations, references and links gives poor user experience even if the content itself is decent.  Most of your readers will simply scan the article to see if they are on the right page.

TL;DR

Often users might bounce back to search results if they are facing a very long, boring article. Providing a table of content or a short summary “selling the article” to them is always a good idea.