Updating Old Content: How to Recover and Grow Traffic

New content gets the attention, but your existing archive is often the fastest path to traffic growth. Refreshing a page that already has authority and history frequently outperforms publishing something brand new. The challenge is knowing which pages to update, and how.

Why content decays

Rankings slip for predictable reasons:

• Information goes stale — statistics, screenshots, and recommendations age.
• Competitors improve — someone published something more thorough.
• Intent shifts — the query now expects a different format.
• Technical rot — broken links, dead redirects, missing images.

Decay is normal. The teams that grow are the ones with a system for catching and reversing it.

Find the decaying pages

Start by identifying pages that have lost ground. In Domain Overview, look for URLs whose positions or traffic have dropped over the last few months. Prioritize by potential, not just by loss — a page that fell from position 3 to 8 on a high-value term is worth more than one that slipped on a term nobody searches.

Group your candidates into three buckets:

1. Refresh — solid page that has simply aged.
2. Consolidate — multiple thin pages competing for one topic.
3. Retire — outdated content with no path back to relevance.

Refreshing a page

When a page is fundamentally sound, refresh rather than rewrite:

• Update statistics, dates, examples, and screenshots.
• Add sections covering sub-topics that now rank — study the current SERP to see what competitors added.
• Improve the title and description, testing in Meta Tags Studio.
• Add or repair internal links to and from the page.
• Re-check phrasing with so years of edits have not skewed it.

Then resubmit the URL for indexing so Google re-crawls promptly.

Consolidating thin pages

If you find three shallow posts all targeting variations of one topic, they are cannibalizing each other. The Thin Content Finder surfaces these quickly. Merge them into one comprehensive page, keep the strongest URL, and 301-redirect the others so their accumulated authority flows to the survivor. One strong page almost always beats three weak ones.

Retiring dead weight

Some pages are past saving — an announcement for an event five years ago, or a guide to a product you discontinued. For these:

• If the URL has backlinks, redirect it to the most relevant living page to preserve authority.
• If it has neither traffic nor links, let it go and remove it from your sitemap.

Pruning genuinely dead content can improve how efficiently Google crawls the rest of your site.

Measure the lift

Refreshing is only worthwhile if you prove it works. Before you publish updates, record the page's current position and traffic. After Google re-crawls, compare. Use Competitor Comparison to confirm you have closed the gap on the pages you were chasing.

Build a refresh cadence

The biggest mistake is treating updates as a one-off spring cleaning. Instead:

• Review your top 50 pages quarterly for decay.
• Flag anything that drops more than a few positions.
• Keep a running refresh queue alongside your new-content calendar.

Many teams find that a disciplined refresh program delivers more incremental traffic per hour of effort than net-new publishing, because you are compounding authority you already earned rather than starting from zero. Your archive is not a museum — it is inventory. Keep it fresh and it keeps paying.