To Publish New or to Update?

July 1st, 2006 by Chris

When you have an article based site you are more or less left with two options when it comes to covering certain topics. Do you write a new article, or do you update an old article?

I run into this often on this site. As the publishing industry changes I often find a need to update or tweak my articles, and I do update them rather than publishing whole new ones.

On one hand publishing a new article might make the site seem more active, or might draw in new visitors. However I like the idea of making sure all the articles on the site are as relevant as they can be, so that they’re always useful. If a visitor comes to your site from a search engine and reads an article that is out of date and irrelevant their opinion of your site as a whole might drop.

Plus, as far as search engines go, older URLs will rank better than new URLs so by keeping the old articles with established links up to date I should enhance or keep high rankings with them. Of course on the other hand by publishing new articles you’ll increase your total article count and thus the number of pages with which someone could discover your site in a search engine.

One thing I plan to do this summer (its like 4th or 5th on my current to-do list) is rewrite most of the articles on this site, especially those associated with my guide. So I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately, I’m pretty sure that I will just be updating old articles though as much as possible, that seems like the best way.

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Posted in: Website Management »  by: Chris

3 Responses to “To Publish New or to Update?”

  1. Mark  Says:
    July 1st, 2006 at 3:58 pm

    Interesting, Chris. In the case of updating old articles, do you feel it’s worth noting for visitors (on the front page at least) that the articles have been updated?

  2. Chris  Says:
    July 1st, 2006 at 6:45 pm

    Possibly. On this site I coded from the beginning update notations in the article itself. So you’ll see original publication date & most recent update date.

    However it is worthwhile to let visitors know when an article has been updated, and the frontpage is a good place for that. In the case of this site though I think I’ll just use the blog to make such announcements.

  3. TeamGrowth  Says:
    September 29th, 2006 at 9:01 am

    I think publishing a new article altogether would be good as it would attract more visitors and more readers while if you update the exisiting articles, notification to the readers who have read that articles becomes imperative.

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