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It is important to ensure that the quality of your website is consistently high, rather than solely focusing on the new webpages you create presently or in the future.

When it comes to your SEO efforts, there’s a debate between whether you should prioritize creating new content or updating existing content. In my view, it’s best to split your SEO efforts in half, with roughly 50% dedicated to updating old content and the other 50% focused on creating new content. This approach offers several benefits that can help improve your website’s overall performance.

Over time, webpages accrue value:

Content on your website can remain relevant for an extended period, which increases its value over time. Pages that have been published for a while would have gained visibility and backlinks, adding more value to them. These pages can still rank high in search results for queries used by your target audience currently. Page freshness is typically not a significant concern for a high Page Quality rating, as even old pages can have excellent ratings.

How can this be interpreted?

This means that even though certain pages on a website may have been published a while ago, they can still be valuable to users and maintain a high level of quality. These pages may have accumulated backlinks and visibility over time, allowing them to continue appearing in search results for relevant user queries. In terms of Google’s Page Quality rating, freshness is not always a crucial factor, as even older pages can receive high ratings.

Consider an informational page about the American Civil War as an example of old content that can still be relevant and considered of high quality. However, not all types of old content can remain relevant unless the material is “evergreen” and up-to-date.

As time goes by, a website may have hundreds or thousands of outdated webpages. This could erode Google’s trust in your site, especially if your competition is refreshing their content on similar topics.

To determine whether your older content is still valuable, check if it ranked on page one of search results when it was first published and whether it has since slipped to page two or lower. Refreshing the content can often bring it back to page one.

Like any asset, webpages depreciate over time. If left unmaintained, they become useless. But when they are well-maintained, they remain a valuable asset. Creating a webpage that is designed, researched, outlined, written, edited, and optimized, along with the addition of engagement objects like images and videos, can take eight hours of quality work. This time investment carries significant cost.

You can choose to ignore outdated content and write it off as a loss, or you can keep it fresh. We prefer the latter as a content strategy and tactic.

What Google says:

To ensure that your website is of high quality, Google recommends that you regularly maintain it. Neglected or outdated websites, as well as inaccurate or misleading content, are considered low quality and can result in a low Page Quality rating.

Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

the takeaways from the provided text:

•   Google considers old or unmaintained webpages as low quality, especially for pages related to “your money or your life,” which can affect people’s health, finances, and well-being.
• A webpage that has inaccurate information is considered low quality by Google, and it may be necessary to update the content frequently to ensure its accuracy, depending on the subject matter.

Overall, these takeaways suggest that maintaining your website’s content is crucial for ensuring its quality and relevance over time. This is especially important for pages that can impact people’s lives and for keeping the information up-to-date and accurate.

•  During a “Office Hours” session in 2019, John Mueller from Google discussed the importance of balancing evergreen and fresh content. He explained that they try to find a balance between presenting the evergreen content, which has been around for a long time and is considered reference material, and the fresh content, which is updated and more relevant to the current search queries. The search engine giant aims to present users with the right balance of both types of content based on the relevance of the search query.
• John Mueller’s response in the 2019 “Office Hours” session suggests that Google strives to balance the presentation of evergreen content, which has been around for a while and is seen as reference material, with fresh content that is more relevant to current user queries. This approach is based on the concept of “query deserves freshness,” which means that search results for certain queries should reflect new and recent content. For more information about this concept, Google’s 2011 blog post provides further details. You can find the link to the blog post here.
•  In a different video from 2021, John Mueller provided advice on how to manage old content on your website. According to him, if you still consider the content to be valuable and want to associate it with your brand, you should keep it on your website. However, if you feel embarrassed about the content or it no longer reflects your standards, you should either update and improve it or remove it altogether.

What to do? A content audit.

To prioritize the refresh of old pages, conducting a web content audit is crucial in addition to creating new webpages for your SEO program. The audit helps you identify weak and underperforming content on your website, so you can improve it. You can use Google Analytics and tools like Screaming Frog, SEMrush, or our SEO Tool Set to gather all the necessary data to analyze the webpages on your site. After compiling the data, you can divide your webpages into three categories based on performance:

After conducting a content audit using tools like Google Analytics, Screaming Frog, Semrush or SEO Tool Set, you can categorize your webpages into three groups.

1: The first group includes the webpages that are already ranking high and getting significant traffic, such as those on the first page of search results.

2: The second group includes the pages with potential to perform better, such as those on the second page of search results.

3: The third group consists of pages that perform poorly and are not in the first two categories. These pages require immediate attention to improve their performance.

After categorizing your webpages, you can take the following actions:

•  Prioritize improving the content in the first two categories, which receive the most traffic and have the most potential to improve.
• Address the poor-performing content in the third category. Some pages may require a content update, others may need optimization, while some content may need a 301 redirect to a more current URL with a similar topic.

Grow and maintain your content:

One of the key benefits of SEO is that your website can continue to gain value and attract traffic over time, thanks to increased visibility and links. However, it’s important to keep your website up-to-date and relevant throughout its lifespan.

To maximize the effectiveness of your SEO efforts, aim to divide your content-focused time equally between creating new webpages and refreshing older ones.

Don’t be discouraged if you discover that your website already contains a large number of outdated pages. Simply prioritize the task of refreshing your content, and make it a regular part of your schedule, just like creating new content.

As you develop a routine for creating new pages, take the time to also identify and update existing pages that are related to the new content. By doing so, you’ll keep your website relevant, engaging, and optimized for search engines.