Updating Pulished Content

[alter-ego]

Lately I've started updating some of my older forum and news content at Lifesupporters.com simply because I've heard google will not re-index older content unless there's reason to. I've also noticed the big G dropping some of my older articles as well even though I believe them to be quite well written and still current.

The question I have is how often (if ever) do you update older content and is it an advisable practice to adopt to retain/recapture SERP Placement?

[P.O.S.]

Originally Posted by alter-ego

Lately I've started updating some of my older forum and news content at Lifesupporters.com simply because I've heard google will not re-index older content unless there's reason to. I've also noticed the big G dropping some of my older articles as well even though I believe them to be quite well written and still current.

The question I have is how often (if ever) do you update older content and is it an advisable practice to adopt to retain/recapture SERP Placement?

I'm not really sure about that. My last update was when the site/s needed an overall redesign.

What if your old content is the most relevant with a search term? What'll be the value of your hard work in writing articles if its not going to be reindexed by Google?

Some sites/blogs gets their content from free article directories, so what if you've submitted your article (which is also posted on your site) and it gets to be used by a blogger? Your article will be considered as an old content on your site and be a new content from that blogger's blog? Now I just got my self confused here

[alter-ego]

lol, now it looks like you've taken a peek into my world.

Essentially all I'm doing is updating old content by carefully editing elements of the body as well as adding more up to date info (where applicable). I'm not touching topic titles or headings so afaik anything previously indexed by title, heading keyword/phrases shouldn't do anything other than bump up closer to page one.

Of course this is all theory as I've seen some mixed results hence the reason I asked this rather confusing question in the first place.

[P.O.S.]

Originally Posted by alter-ego

lol, now it looks like you've taken a peek into my world.

Essentially all I'm doing is updating old content by carefully editing elements of the body as well as adding more up to date info (where applicable). I'm not touching topic titles or headings so afaik anything previously indexed by title, heading keyword/phrases shouldn't do anything other than bump up closer to page one.

Of course this is all theory as I've seen some mixed results hence the reason I asked this rather confusing question in the first place.

hahaha.. now my head is swirling
I do updates when a keyword or two is needed to be placed on the content, or when a keyword is added/removed on the meta tags. It does help in getting that certain page of yours increase its ranking, but I'm still not sure about it getting unidexed if not updated for a long period of time.

[bogs]

i don't update old articles or contents.. i just make sure its still indexed..

[alter-ego]

First off, can a mod please fix my spelling; it should be Updating Published Content not Updating Pulished Content, sorry

I started wondering whether or not it was simply a case of falling SERP indexing or outright removal from indexes and still don't have a good answer to the question. I do know however how many url's are in my sitemaps and according to google, not all of them are indexed.

Now this could be due to many reasons:

• the content simply sux
• some indexed content was lost during site software changes
• I didn't have proper re-directs setup to re-index the old content under the new url's
• the content is primarily made up of stopwords
• potential for duplicate content

...of course this may go a way toward explaining some of the forum content but still does nothing for the article content.