What To Do With Old Content: Update It, Delete It, or Leave It Alone?

What To Do With Old Content: Update It, Delete It, or Leave It Alone?

May 12, 2025

Reading Time: 3 minutes
What To Do With Old Content

If you’ve been in the Internet marketing game for a long time, you’ll most likely have racked up quite a collection of content over the years, from landing pages to blogs and resource articles. Some of this content may be outdated or even underperforming compared to newer content. The first question you may ask is whether this is harmful to your overall SEO strategy. The second may be what you should do about it.

There are three options for what to do with your old content:

  • Update your older content to meet modern SEO standards
  • Delete it altogether
  • Leave it as it is

But which is the right choice for your content?

Why Does Your Old Content Matter?

Your old content still plays a role in your rankings, either for good or ill. If left alone, there’s a possibility that it could remain an asset to you. However, if it’s outdated enough or uses SEO techniques that are now considered black hat, it could actually be a liability to you. Low-quality content can drag down your website’s performance. Outdated information could affect your trustworthiness and authority in the eyes of your audience.

What Should You Do With Your Old Content?

What you should do may actually differ page by page or blog by blog. What is right for one particular article may not be the best course of action for another page. That’s why thorough audits of your old content on a consistent basis are so important before you take any actions.

via GIPHY

How Often Should You Audit Your Content?

Audits should be a consistent part of your content strategy, but how often can depend on the size of your site and the thoroughness of the audit. You don’t have to do a super comprehensive audit monthly, for example, but maybe that really thorough audit could be done once or twice a year. That doesn’t mean you’re not keeping an eye on the content in the meantime. A quarterly or monthly review of key assets can help you detect declines in rankings early.

Note that it’s a good idea to conduct an audit anytime Google updates its algorithm. Algorithm updates can mean that content that formerly ranked well may drop a bit in the rankings and may warrant a reworking of content updating priorities.

What Should Your Content Audit Look at?

Traffic stats are important, as they can let you know which pages and blog posts are getting the most (or not) attention. But that’s not the only metric you should be looking at to determine what to do with your old content. The following metrics are useful:

  • Organic traffic trends: Is traffic increasing, decreasing, or stagnating?
  • Keyword rankings: Is each page or post ranking for relevant keywords?
  • Engagement metrics: Are users still interacting with your content? Check the following metrics:
    • Bounce rate
    • Average time on page
    • Click-through rate
  • Conversion performance: Does the content lead to email signups or another desired action?
  • Backlinks: Are reputable websites linking back to the content?
  • Content accuracy: Is the content up-to-date and accurate, or does it include outdated stats and references?
  • Relevance: Is the content still relevant to your business goals and target audience?
  • Technical health: Are there broken links, missing metadata, slow load times, or anything else impacting the speed and overall health of the page?

via GIPHY

What Should You Do With What Content?

The results of your audit will tell you what you should do with each page or blog post:

Content To Update

Any content that is fundamentally strong but that is no longer fully current can be updated. Evergreen articles with outdated references and links, for example, or content that ranks on the second or third SERP are strong contenders for updating. You don’t want to waste your time and efforts on content that doesn’t have a chance of regaining lost rankings,

Content To Remove

Irrelevant, duplicate, or thin content, or content that just no longer aligns with your organization’s goals and audience, can all be safely deleted. These would require too much work to improve to the point where they aligned with your current needs and standards, if that’s even possible. Unpublishing content like this or redirecting its URL to a better-performing page can help your SEO rankings more than updating this type of content.

Leave It Alone

If it’s performing well, then it’s best to leave it untouched. After all, why fix what isn’t broken, even if it’s older? It’s still a good idea to keep an eye on this content, however, and then update it if starts to show signs of a decline in rankings.

Need help in improving your presence on search engines?

Get in Touch with BrainVine!
How SEO Has Changed in 2025

How SEO Has Changed in 2025

Feb 7, 2025

Reading Time: 3 minutes
How SEO Has Changed in 2025

We’ve been hearing a lot of digital marketers say that SEO is dead. However, this is far from true. These reports of SEO being dead or otherwise useless in 2025 may be a reaction to how the SEO landscape has changed with generative AI. That doesn’t mean SEO is dead, though. Far from it, in fact! It’s just different than it used to be, and that’s okay. SEO has been changing for decades in reaction to Google updates and other factors that have impacted the SEO landscape. SEO will evolve again to meet new needs.

Why Are People Saying SEO Is Dead?

Those who say that SEO is “dead” do so for the following reasons:

  1. Google’s Helpful Content updates and AI-driven ranking systems reduce the effectiveness of certain SEO tactics.
  2. AI-generated search results take up a large portion of the top of the SERP, pushing traditional website results further down the page.
  3. Zero-click search results from the Featured Snippet, local pack, knowledge panels, and Google’s Search Generative Experience mean that users don’t have to click away from the SERP to get their questions answered.
  4. Ads and paid promotions also take up much of the SERP, pushing organic results further down the page and making organic SEO more competitive.

 

 

 

via GIPHY

Why SEO Is Still Alive in 2025

Despite all of these changes, SEO is still alive and well and as essential as it was before for getting found online. It’s just that it’s different from how it was at the beginning. But that’s a process that has been in progress for a long time, ever since Google’s first major update, the Panda Update. Before that, SEO was kind of a Dark Age of black hat SEO techniques that let people game search engines and spam them with low-quality content, edging out the actual good content that people were looking for.

What Doesn’t Work Anymore in 2025?

A lot of what doesn’t work anymore is SEO techniques that look to game the system, just like the black hat SEO of old. While these techniques aren’t as egregious as they used to be, thanks to Google’s many core updates since then, Google has been gradually pushing for the SEO techniques that are more focused on quality content and user experience than anything else.

What SEO Techniques Should You Use in 2025?

Because of Google’s emphasis on higher quality content and also the increased presence of AI and ads, the best approach to SEO in 2025 is twofold: focus on quality content and focus on what can rank at the top of the SERP.

 

via GIPHY

 

EEAT

High quality content focuses on experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Aiming for these four qualities will ensure that your content is consistently able to rank well on SERPs. Even though the top spot might be a bit farther down the page than it used to be, it’s still worth trying to rank for because not every SERP has such a big AI section. Even if the SERP does, there are still users who look for actual sites rather than just trusting the AI to be correct.

The main thing, however, is to focus on the type of content that AI can’t provide. That’s where your own lived human experiences come into play.

Featured Snippets and Videos

Another option is ranking at the top of the SERP within the generative AI section. While much of what ends up here is paid ads, there are still featured snippets and videos that are placed right at the top of the page. Creating a YouTube video strategy can help you to rank well on both Google and on YouTube, which is a search engine itself. To try to rank as the featured snippet, you can use long-tail keywords to answer questions directly. This means that sections within a page can rank rather than just a page by itself.

Need help in improving your presence on search engines?

Get in Touch with BrainVine!
Is Answer Engine Optimization the Future of SEO?

Is Answer Engine Optimization the Future of SEO?

Jan 8, 2025

Reading Time: 2 minutes
Is Answer Engine Optimization the Future of SEO

By now you’ll have noticed the generative AI section that appears at the top of most Google SERPs. This generative AI answer has been driving search results further and further down the SERP, meaning that the top search result doesn’t mean quite as much as it used to. This doesn’t mean that your SEO efforts are useless, however. But we now have a name for the strategy of optimizing specifically for generative AI: answer engine optimization (AEO).

What Is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of optimizing digital content so that it provides quick, concise, and accurate answers to user queries—often in the form of featured snippets, knowledge panels, or other instantly visible answers on search results pages. While traditional search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on ranking as high as possible for relevant keywords, AEO goes one step further by tailoring content to directly answer the specific questions users are asking.

What Is the Difference Between AEO and SEO?

AEO is a specific strategy that falls under the umbrella of SEO. SEO seeks to optimize for all parts of the search engine through a variety of strategies, including link-building and keyword research.  AEO, on the other hand, is more focused on answering specific user queries. Although the presence of AI is relatively new, the core concept of AEO isn’t actually new. It’s very similar to strategies for the featured snippet or for voice search.

What Are Key AEO Strategies?

Fortunately, the core strategies for AEO aren’t that different from what you should already have been doing. The following are things you can do specifically for AEO but also to maintain a good SEO strategy overall.

Long-Tail Keywords

Focusing on long-tail keywords has already been a strategy for voice-activated devices and apps like Siri and Alexa. People tend to ask questions like they’re talking to another person when they use a voice search rather than typing a few keywords into the search engine. Generative AI is no different. People chat with it like it’s a person, so the same strategy of optimizing for long-tail keywords can apply here, too.

Leverage FAQs

FAQs are an example of this strategy in action. There’s one question highlighted and answered concisely. This is the type of answer that can be featured in the generative AI section because it’s structured as a quick answer. You can use bullet points, clear headings (that are long-tail keywords) and a concise answer directly beneath the heading that is either the entire answer or summarizes longer-form content below.

EEAT

Google has long stated that high-quality content is what the company wants to deliver to its searchers. Generative AI hasn’t changed that. In fact, high quality content across the board can increase your chances of getting the featured snippet because you’ve established your site’s trustworthiness and authority in the subject. It’s a good idea to continue to produce the best possible content you can and even to go through older content to make sure that it’s still accurate and up-to-date.

Need help in improving your presence on search engines?

Get in Touch with BrainVine!
How the August 2024 Google Core Update Affected SEO

How the August 2024 Google Core Update Affected SEO

Oct 21, 2024

Reading Time: 3 minutes
How the August 2024 Google Core Update Affected SEO
Google finished its second core update of the year at the beginning of September. This core update, which began to roll out in August of 2024 took 19 total days to complete, which is, while still on the long side, much shorter than the other big update this year. The March 2024 core update took an unprecedented 45 days to fully roll out.

So now that the August update has finished and we’ve had some time to look at how it affected the SEO landscape, is there anything that you should know?

What Did the August 2024 Core Updated Change?

According to Google’s own announcementabout the update, it was designed to improve the algorithm’s ability to match users with the best possible content. The ultimate goal was to show more content that was genuinely interesting and useful to searchers rather than content that was created specifically to rank on the search engine results page (SERP). The update also took into account feedback from smaller creators, who had complained that their quality content wasn’t able to compete as well even though it was relevant.

via GIPHY

White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO

The battle between white-hat SEO and black-hat SEO has been ongoing since the dawn of Google. There have always been creators who create content with the intent of gaming the search engines. These tactics, called black hat SEO, worked back in the dark ages of Google but Google quickly released the Panda Update, which completely overhauled the search algorithm to reward sites that prioritized user experience and punish those that utilized user-unfriendly tactics like keyword stuffing to prioritize the search engine rankings.

While black hat SEO looks very different now than it did back in the early days of Google, it still exists. Any SEO technique that puts the search engine over users can qualify as black hat; it may not look like keyword stuffing anymore because that no longer works but it’s evolved along with Google. Google’s goal is to match users with the best possible results, so prioritizing users and providing them with genuinely useful content can help future-proof your SEO because that’s the kind of content that Google is continually refining its algorithm to prioritize. This latest update is no exception.

via GIPHY

AI Pricing Smaller Creators Out of SEO

Earlier this year, we wondered whether smaller creators who couldn’t afford to pay to play in the Google SERP landscape were getting priced out of SEO. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones concerned that those with smaller budgets weren’t going to be able to compete and Google received feedback from those smaller businesses and individuals who felt that their content wasn’t ranking as well as it ought to, given the quality of the content. This update aims to address that and give smaller creators a chance to rank; before, larger creators would be seen as more authoritative simply because they had the resources and name recognition to garner backlinks that smaller creators wouldn’t.

What Results Did Creators See After the Update?

SEMRush reported that a majority of its users saw changes in their rankings, whether good or bad. Most saw some decreases in rankings, although many did see increases as well. Google’s advice for what to do if your rankings drop is to revisit your content strategy to make sure that you’re creating the highest possible quality of content, namely following Google’s EEAT guidelines. We’ve been advising for years to put your users first rather than search engines and we stand by that advice.

Need help in improving your presence on search engines?

Get in Touch with BrainVine!
How To Rank in the Google Search Generative Experience

How To Rank in the Google Search Generative Experience

Aug 12, 2024

Reading Time: 3 minutes
How To Rank in the Google Search Generative Experience

With the rise of AI-driven content creation and the rapid evolution of search engines, Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) is transforming how users find information. Unlike traditional search, SGE taps into the power of generative AI to craft more comprehensive, conversational responses, making it essential for website owners, content creators, and digital marketers to adapt their strategies in order to stay competitive.

What Is the Google Search Generative Experience (SGE)?

You may have noticed that at the top of some Google SERPs, there is now a section at the top where generative AI can provide an answer to the search before the ranked web pages. Users can ask additional questions with the generative AI without leaving the SERP. While the SGE offers searchers a more conversational search experience, for those trying to rank for the top spots on the SERP, it means that the top spot now means less as it’s been pushed further down the page.

This doesn’t mean that SEO is now useless. It is, however, a good opportunity to take a look at your SEO strategies and make sure that they’re taking the SGE into account.

#1: Prioritize High-Quality, Factual Content

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: EEAT is possibly the most important factor in modern SEO. Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness are the qualities that Google is looking for in content that is eligible to rank highly. If your content doesn’t follow the EEAT guidelines, then it’s unlikely to rank on the first page of the search results at all, let alone in the top spot or in the SGE.

#2: Optimize for Conversational and Long-Tail Queries

Generative AI is designed to interact in a conversational way with users. This means that keywords should be framed in a conversational way. Long tail keywords, which are longer key phrases instead of individual words, are good examples of this. In many cases, users are asking questions, so wording a key phrase as a question can be a good way to keep your SEO more competitive in the generative AI landscape.

#3: Don’t Rely Only on Written Content

The AI powering SGE is not limited to text. It considers multimedia content like videos, podcasts, and images. Including diverse content formats will give your brand more opportunities to be featured. YouTube videos in particular can rank very highly in the SGE. YouTube is owned by Google and is a search engine in its own right, which means that YouTube videos have two opportunities to rank: first on YouTube and then again on the Google SERP. YouTube videos can be very valuable additions to any SEO strategy because videos don’t rank below the SGE, they rank within it at the top of the page.

#4: User Experience Still Matters

If a user isn’t getting the answers they’re looking for in the SGE, they may scroll down until they do. This means that user experience, which drives the metrics Google is using to rank pages, such as click-through rate, bounce rate, and dwell time, still matter. As the SERP landscape adjusts, it’s important to make sure that no matter how the Google search results shake out you’re still providing users with a good experience on your site in addition to good content because this ultimately is in line with Google’s own goal of providing a good user experience and the content that best answers their question.

Creating your content users in mind over the search engines can have the added benefit of helping to future-proof your SEO as much as possible, even in a search engine landscape that is constantly changing.

Need help in improving your presence on search engines?

Get in Touch with BrainVine!
How Generative AI Is Impacting SEO in 2024

How Generative AI Is Impacting SEO in 2024

Jul 15, 2024

Reading Time: 3 minutes
How Generative AI Is Impacting SEO in 2024

You may have noticed that when you search for something on Google, you get a response from generative AI at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). This is Google Search Generative Experience, or Google SGE, and it’s been gradually changing the landscape of the SERP and thus, of SEO, as it is rolled out across more and more search queries. But what, exactly, does this mean for SEO?

How Does Google Search Generative Experience Affect the Search Engine Results Page?

The primary effect is that the number 1 search result, a highly prized ranking, is much further down on the SERP. The top of the screen is taken up by sponsored ads, generative AI, and YouTube videos. Users have to scroll down to see even the first result on many SERPs, let alone those lower ranked. This makes that top spot much less valuable because generative AI may have already answered the user’s question, reducing the likelihood that they will scroll down to see the web pages that have ranked for that query.

via GIPHY

What Can We Do To Compete With Generative AI?

In many ways, we can’t compete with generative AI. However, that doesn’t mean that we’re out of the SEO game. Even as SEO is changing to reflect the presence of generative AI, there are strategies we can focus on to help users find our content.

1. Improve Your Local SEO

Local SEO is going to be increasingly important as generative AI takes over more of the regular SERPs. If a user searches for a keyword in a specific location (for example, “Detroit coffee shop” or “Mexican restaurant near me”), then Google provides a Google map result with the Google Business Profile entries for local businesses that fit the search criteria. If you have a physical location for your business, then filling out this profile in full can help people to find you.

2. Get Into the YouTube Game

YouTube is a search engine in its own right and many people are turning to videos over written content. This presents an opportunity for ranking within YouTube as well as ranking at the top of the Google SERP, which does, depending on the query, include relevant YouTube videos in the generative AI section of the SERP. This represents an opportunity to appear at the top of the SERP, above the top search result in addition to within YouTube’s own search algorithm, providing two places to rank with one video.

3. Focus on Expertise and Experience

Google has long recommended following the EEAT (formerly EAT) guidelines to produce high-quality content: expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. Generative AI may be useful for many things, but it cannot replicate human experience. Focusing on your expertise and experience within your field can provide insights that no generative AI can offer. This type of content could attract users who are looking for something more than the more generic responses that AI could provide.

4. Keep Humans Involved

Perhaps the most important thing is to remember that, despite the involvement of AI, Google’s aim is predominantly to connect people with the best possible answers. AI cannot understand people the way people do, so people should therefore be involved in every step of your content creation process, even if you use generative AI yourself. This is because AI can make errors or may misunderstand human emotions and experiences. Having everything at a minimum reviewed by a human maintains a personal touch and increases accuracy. On top of that, it provides something that AI can’t, which is what can compete with AI online.

Need help in improving your presence on search engines?

Get in Touch with BrainVine!