Why updating your old blog post isn't always a good thing

I have quite recently done a case study on if updating one's old blog post is always a good idea and I looked at Neil Patel's own resource on this topic to investigate it further.

The result is very surprising!

The reason why I had intended to do such a study at all is because I work with NLP (Natural Language Processing) on a daily basis. This has shown me how even small changes in the context of content on a web page can change the way the machine understands one's text.

Many SEOs say updating your old content can help with your rankings. But what is the logic to that and how does the machine (Google) understand text and content when it is edited? That is what we are here to find out.

As I said, we looked at Neil Patel's own blog post on the topic "neilpatel,com/blog/bring-old-blog-posts-back-to-life-5-strategies-that-work/" and the results we saw after he had made major content changes were very surprising:

The conclusion I came to about if updating your content is always a good thing based on the study was:

"Yes and No. We have seen that changing the context of your content can change the way Google understands your content and could impact your rankings. You might see a sudden increase in your rankings and then a decrease as Google gets a better understanding of the changed content, however, changing the content will have an impact."

So when updating your old blog posts content make sure to:

• Ensure the context of the content stays the same after adding or removing text.
• You should only remove text when it provides higher emphasis to your main keywords and without changing the context.

You can read all our entire study here, as well as see what tools you can use to find out if an update of your content has had a positive or negative impact on the page rankings:

Would updating your blog content really increase your rankings?

Please let me know your experiences on updating content and if you got any tips for staying on a growth path