The value of republishing older blog posts has emerged as a controversial issue in digital and content marketing circles.

Some SEO and web content experts argue that republishing older blog posts is a potent content marketing tactic to attract additional web traffic and incoming links –with much less work than producing new content. In fact, HubSpot says republishing posts is a tactic that every blogger should know about.

Republishing posts is best for blogs that have existed for at least a couple years and have already accumulated significant organic search traffic, blog subscribers and social media followers, the experts say, Republishing should augment new content, not replace it.

Republishing a blog post entails changing the publication date in WordPress or other blogging platform from the older to the current publication date. That changes the chronological order of the post but avoids actually duplicating the content.

An historical analysis revealed that a relatively small number of HubSpot’s posts that are more than a month old generate most of the page views and leads, wrote Pamela Vaughan, manager of optimization and growth for the HubSpot blog. The site publishes about 200 new posts every month and has published a total of almost 6,000 posts. Here’s the surprising fact: 30 of the posts generate 46 percent of the leads produced by the blog.

The revelation prompted the team to stop focusing solely on creating new content and to try to improve older posts. It prompted its “historical optimization” project that attempted to generate more leads from existing posts with high traffic but few leads and attracting more traffic to posts with more leads but lower traffic volumes.

Reoptimizing and republishing old posts more than doubled HubSpot’s monthly leads and increased monthly organic search views of older posts by an average of 106 percent.

The Benefits of Republishing Blog Posts

Vaughan presents several reasons why republishing is remarkably advantageous.

The number of blog posts has exploded in recent years as more businesses adopt content marketing. More businesses are creating content, but content consumption has remained static, creating a glut of posts with a low number of visits.

“This is why historical optimization becomes so important,” Vaughan argues. “Not only is it a way to get more out of the content you already have; but it’s also a way to get a leg up on such a competitive content landscape.”

Google’s search algorithm rewards freshness. Google wants valuable and up-to-date content. Readers also favor freshness. Some prefer recently published posts and consider the publication date before reading the content. At CyberAlert, we do exactly that when we curate content about media monitoring and measurement. Our mission is to deliver solid education with the most up-to-date perspective.

Republishing also retains the strong SEO value that older posts have developed.

A Republishing Test

Econsultancy found both pros and cons when it tested the strategy, said Econsultancy Editor in Chief Graham Charlton. Although republishing posts was successful from an SEO and web traffic point of view, he remains undecided about the tactic.

The website found that recycling posts does help add new backlinks, he said, noting that backlinks can become broken over time.

It placed, or “resurfaced,” useful content before its audience. Due to site search and navigation shortcomings, viewers sometimes may have difficulty finding high-quality older posts.

Updating and re-editing posts requires much less work than creating new content from scratch. That provided more time to create more substantive new posts.

In addition, older posts were linked to newer related reports, training courses and events, which helped create new leads.

Still, the strategy prompted some misgivings, according to Charlton. For one thing, it felt like cheating. It seems too easy for an organization interested in creating quality, original content.

Some may believe it’s misleading. The blog labeled posts as republished, updated versions of previous posts, but some viewers might miss the labels.

There is often one clear tip-off to republished blog posts: the dates on comments. Econsultancy decided to leave comments for reasons of transparency and the fact that many comments were quite insightful.

Republishing blog posts can certainly be beneficial, but it must be done with carefully-selected articles that have proven popular. Updating the post to include new information or perspective can make the republished post more attractive to both readers and search engines. It’s probably best to label the post as republished or updated.

Bottom Line: Leading blogs have found they can increase web site traffic and gain new backlinks by updating and republishing old blog posts. A major advantage is that refreshing posts requires much less lime that creating new content from scratch. It also makes the blog’s valuable content more readily available through search engines which value freshness. The strategy has limitations, however, and some bloggers and content marketers remain suspicious of the idea.

What’s your opinion? What has been your experience in republishing blog posts? Or why do you not republish blog posts?

Glean.info grants permission to republish this article provided that the republished version contains a link to the original article on the Glean.info Blog.

William Comcowich

William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.