The following blog tip has been submitted by Jon Gales – the editor of the wonderful MobileTracker blog. Learn more about Jon from this interview we did with him earlier in the year.
For sites that deal with products or time sensitive information, it’s a great idea to go back and edit older posts to reflect new information.
For example, you may post when a product is announced and again when it ships. Search engine visitors might come to your first post in droves (perhaps it was linked to quite a bit), even after the product has shipped. Adding a small note that the product is now shipping, along with a link to your newest post is a great way to both increase page views and increase the satisfaction of your visitors.
Real life example – Samsung P207
Even without a product based site this is an issue. My new blog is a niche news site and I often blog about something more than once as the story develops. If you don’t have time to fully update the old entries I simply trackback to the next most recent post about the topic. (Yes, trackbacking to myself… kinda like talking to myself which I do quite well.)
So in the end someone could view the first post, see the trackback to the next sequential post, and follow the story along. Of course this might not work so well if you have tons of comments and the trackbacks get lost in there, but if you don’t have many comments the story can be easily followed like this.
Absolutely, I’m constantly checking my referrers to see what pages are being accessed and updating them with links to the latest info. Anyone who depends on affiliate revenue should be doing this too.
Actually, what I do is change/update the original post and also take the opportunity to shamelessly announce that change in a current posting.
Another related tip with this is I also have a “Related stories” section that goes out and grabs other stories on my site that are similar. When I go back and update an old story, it redoes the related stories section at the same time, so odds are any new stuff I wrote about the same topic will be available down there. Same for the new content–it will link to the old. Pretty handy.
Chris: That amounts to the same thing I’m talking about. Let’s say a new phone that was announced six months ago now hits a carrier. I’ll make a new post saying that it’s on a carrier (probably somewhere link back to the original story for folks that want to know a little more). Then I’ll go update the older story to let people that stumble there know that it’s really shipping now.
good idea. takes a bit of time to scour back though.