Does Republishing a Blog Post Actually Help It?

Learn whether republishing a blog post actually boosts its rankings and how you can optimize your website’s content without creating new posts seven days a week!

What Does it Mean to Republish an Old Post, and Why Should You Do It? 

If you’ve been blogging for over a year, chances are you have some older posts that aren’t doing super well in Google’s eyes. If this is the case, it’s probably time to start republishing! 

Republishing a post is exactly what it sounds like. You simply take an old post, and update it to be as if you published it today. 

However, it’s not enough just to click update. In fact, that might actually hurt your blog in the long run. Instead, the key is to update the posts with new information, pictures, etc. 

Doing this will show Google that you care about your articles and work to keep them relevant and helpful for the reader. It also makes it easy to evaluate what’s working on your site and what’s not and implement new SEO strategies you may have learned since last publishing. 

All of this helps boost your old posts’ rankings, build your domain authority, and ultimately drive more traffic to your blog, boosting revenue. Plus, if you get in a cycle of updating, it can significantly cut down on the amount of new posts you have to create! 

How to Republish Food Blog Posts Effectively 

I like to set reminders to check on posts about every nine to twelve months. I look at the traffic coming in and how they’re ranking in terms of SEO.

Then, republish if: 

• The traffic has dipped significantly from what it once was. 

• The post is not ranking at all. 

• The post is ranking for entirely different (and relevant to the recipe) keywords. 

• The post is ranking fairly highly.

Note: I do not republish if posts are ranking in the top one to three for their specific keyword! 

When republishing, I: 

• Update the layout of the post, if necessary, to emulate the current posts on the site. 

• Make sure all information is still accurate and relevant. 

• Update links as needed and add more where applicable. 

• Enhance the existing information. 

• Remove irrelevant information. 

• Optimize images, recipe cards, tags, meta, etc. 

Tips for Pushing Republished Posts to the Home Page 

When republishing posts, I don’t always recommend pushing them to the home page right away, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth publishing! 

For instance, I recommend republishing seasonal posts two to three months ahead of time so they have plenty of time to be crawled and indexed. Then, all you have to do is add them to the calendar, and push them to the front of your site when the time is right. 

Use your best judgment here. If you think a republished post is relevant to the season, helpful to the readers, and one your audience will be excited about - go ahead and push it to the front! 

On the other hand, if it’s a little ahead of a season, a post you’re just trying to boost in terms of on-page SEO, or a super old one that just needed work, you can probably hold off. 

However, I will note that it is worth the effort to treat republished posts that have been pushed to the home page just as you would brand new posts, and add them to your newsletters, social blasts, etc. The more traffic the better! 

I hope you found this post helpful. I’m a huge fan of republishing old content and recommend it to all my clients. If you’ve got too much on your plate, I’d be happy to help rewrite and republish your old food blog pages for you.