If you’ve found this, you’re no doubt up on SEO. Which means you’ve also probably got a tonne of old blog posts packed with juicy keywords?

Perhaps you’ve also found that your crawl rate is lower than it has been, and only a small portion of your site is indexed?

This was the case with Super Free Bingo – a site that I manage SEO strategies for. While our team spends a lot of time off-site generating new links, and creating new content on-site, all those great bingo stories that were written two years ago are were sitting unused and not indexed!

Time to up the crawl rate!

How to get the bots back to your old content? Change it. Make it new old content.

(Note: I am not suggesting you change the date – just update the content)

The idea is simple: if the bots are revisiting your old content, they’re going to discover all those keywords and interlinks. They’re also going to visit you more often to keep up with your changes. The more you update, the more they index. The more they index, the more chance you have of ranking for major keywords and longtail keyphrases.

Add new content

Add new content to your old blog posts: an “Update: …” line fits in well, or perhaps something like “Read about the developments here …” and link to a new post.

Change the location

Wordpress is gold: it will automatically redirect a post from the old URL to the new URL. This means that if you change the URL, any links to your old posts should redirect. You probably also know more about how to optimise your URLs with keywords now than you did two years ago!

I wouldn’t go over the top with this practice, but it does help. As well as refreshing the page to the bots, it also refreshes the archive pages (category and link pages) that link to it – bringing these to attention, and all the pages linked from them.

In the same way, you can also change the blog category. Great for spring-cleaning also!

Link to old content

Point the bots to all your new changes and wait for a spike in your crawl rate and, hopefully, your rankings!

In practice

How do I know this works? About a month ago I tested two different bingo operators on Super Free Bingo.

For one operator, Littlewoods Bingo, I did nothing but edit old stories related to the Littlewoods page. I probably edited / updated 50 posts or so over a period of one to two weeks. At the same time I pinged Technorati and other services, and, briefly, manually-increased the site’s crawl rate in Google Webmasters so that the bots would find these changes.

For another operator, Posh Bingo, I focused on generating new links to the page itself, and to the old stories. The idea was that the bots would revisit the old pages after finding the new links to them. All of these links were from other bingo blogs.

Results

At the beginning of the test, both operators were at the top of the third page for their respective terms on Google.co.uk.

The Littlewoods Bingo page then slowly climbed its way to the first page and is now quite steady at 6th or 7th result.

Posh Bingo actually fell away, and the site’s Posh Bingo page is now ranked on the fourth page – losing a whole page!

SEO isn’t just about LINKS

As you can see! Re-use your old content and reap the benefits! By keeping your site fresh and active, you’ll keep the bots there discovering your keywords, content and interlinks. Hopefully you’ll then see results like I did!

Enjoy!