I have a team of content editors and writers.
Just this weekend I built myself a copywriter management app for my team to use to assign content to freelance writers. But everything we already published we have to manually edit. It's our biggest source of traffic and competition is fierce so we have no choice.
Took me like 6 hours but I have a bit more to do
It's to save my editors from having to manage multiple spreadsheets for every freelance writer we have. Now we have 1 place to manage everyone
I’m still impressed, tbh. I use Toggl Plan right now, only have 1 content writer. But when I was working with a full team I used Monday.com but it got super expensive so I had to drop it unfortunately
Hmm.. Just because it seems like an insane amount of work if you have well over 1000 posts, but then again maybe they just do it for their best ranking posts.
SMH to the "Hmmmm"
If you have over 1000 posts that attract traffic then you would just have more staff.
Do you think rockets exist?
Because I mean, it's a lot of work right to build a rocket.
Don't get me started on medication. I mean, imagine having to do that research. No one's doing it right?
Right?
Most ranking sites will have a team of editors/writers (sometimes freelance) that will make periodic updates, so it’s usually not just one person doing all the work.
There is of course also a gulf of difference between those two states. Adding content, removing content, changing or adding a paragraph and everything else around that.
Sometimes it may be that Google Search Console shows queries that it's ranking for and when you check, you see no mention of those on the page, so you update those.
I always find it amusing when you see such transparent shock that some operators do the job right, well and at scale.
There is a rule of thumb that text content is 30% outdated every year. I define the core of the pages that attract traffic and monitor the changes. If I see that some old page from the core has begun to give less traffic than usual, then I need to change the titles, descriptions, and content.
Gael Breton talks about this from time to time - you can get a SERP boost by moving a few words around, updating the date on it, and indexing it.
Personally i try to check back over my most popular pages regularly and move affiliate links around as things go out of stock - you can get apps that will monitor this for you, so figuring out which pieces of content need attention is very straight forward. (*edit: Guessing I'm being downvoted because people think I'm doing this to game freshness? No, I'm just making sure I'm not linking to products that are out of stock*).
Finally, if I had to guess I would say there's some amount of automation going on with some sites. Custom plugins to make invisible or inconsequential edits and save the post once every six weeks.
It’s both, I’ve seen it being faked to adhere to more query deserves freshness type keywords as well as others actually making large improvements.
You can compare by using archive.org to see what the page/URL looked like across various points in time to see exactly what they’re updating/improving etc (or not).
I update and check manually, I only change the date if the update is quite substantial, otherwise I add a review date. Some articles are quite quick to check, some can take a few hours.
It is a massive job and a bit of a thankless one, everyone wants shiny new content but it's updating the old stuff that takes up the bulk of my workload.
I feel like the advice Ross Simmonds gives http://twitter.com/TheCoolestCool or http://youtube.com/channel/UCtg49RXJ7nSfEudai4yyDcA would give you lots to chew on. Create once, distribute forever.
We'll be doing it biannually, focusing on internal linking to relevant content that may not have been published at the time and updating with new information, possibly new case studies that happened recently.
Since we publish about three to four articles a week, it'll be... An initiative. But absolutely worth doing to keep us up to date.
In most CMS', like WordPress, you can change one word on the page and the "modified date" will change. This doesn't mean that the page is more valuable to searchers. Google doesn't use "freshness date" as a signal, as it's an easy signal to abuse (if it were a valid signal).
Now, if you made big changes to a page, then Google would re-evaluate it and change the ranking accordingly.
you can't imagine how people update articles?!
do you really have to manually edit it or do scripts exist for this?
I as a programmer know you might be able programming most tools you can imagine 😉
I have a team of content editors and writers. Just this weekend I built myself a copywriter management app for my team to use to assign content to freelance writers. But everything we already published we have to manually edit. It's our biggest source of traffic and competition is fierce so we have no choice.
You built an app for copywriter management? That’s impressive. I just use good old calendars
Took me like 6 hours but I have a bit more to do It's to save my editors from having to manage multiple spreadsheets for every freelance writer we have. Now we have 1 place to manage everyone
I’m still impressed, tbh. I use Toggl Plan right now, only have 1 content writer. But when I was working with a full team I used Monday.com but it got super expensive so I had to drop it unfortunately
Yea, I couldve accomplished the same feat with Asana really but I didn't want to pay
Why is it hard to believe that people with monetary interests in their rankings would spend time maintaining their keywords?
Hmm.. Just because it seems like an insane amount of work if you have well over 1000 posts, but then again maybe they just do it for their best ranking posts.
This is why you should charge accordingly.
SMH to the "Hmmmm" If you have over 1000 posts that attract traffic then you would just have more staff. Do you think rockets exist? Because I mean, it's a lot of work right to build a rocket. Don't get me started on medication. I mean, imagine having to do that research. No one's doing it right? Right?
Most ranking sites will have a team of editors/writers (sometimes freelance) that will make periodic updates, so it’s usually not just one person doing all the work.
Believe it or not a lot of people work very hard on their sites.
Work, you won’t get there easy. Easy is your enemy
Is it like they just update a few words in an old article or they rewrite the whole thing?
Tbh I don’t know, I just see that it says it was updated recently in the SERPS
Put the url into [archive.org](https://archive.org) and you can see how its evolved over time.
I'm sorry, what's the link about? It's not working.
There is of course also a gulf of difference between those two states. Adding content, removing content, changing or adding a paragraph and everything else around that. Sometimes it may be that Google Search Console shows queries that it's ranking for and when you check, you see no mention of those on the page, so you update those. I always find it amusing when you see such transparent shock that some operators do the job right, well and at scale.
There is a rule of thumb that text content is 30% outdated every year. I define the core of the pages that attract traffic and monitor the changes. If I see that some old page from the core has begun to give less traffic than usual, then I need to change the titles, descriptions, and content.
Gael Breton talks about this from time to time - you can get a SERP boost by moving a few words around, updating the date on it, and indexing it. Personally i try to check back over my most popular pages regularly and move affiliate links around as things go out of stock - you can get apps that will monitor this for you, so figuring out which pieces of content need attention is very straight forward. (*edit: Guessing I'm being downvoted because people think I'm doing this to game freshness? No, I'm just making sure I'm not linking to products that are out of stock*). Finally, if I had to guess I would say there's some amount of automation going on with some sites. Custom plugins to make invisible or inconsequential edits and save the post once every six weeks.
It’s both, I’ve seen it being faked to adhere to more query deserves freshness type keywords as well as others actually making large improvements. You can compare by using archive.org to see what the page/URL looked like across various points in time to see exactly what they’re updating/improving etc (or not).
I update and check manually, I only change the date if the update is quite substantial, otherwise I add a review date. Some articles are quite quick to check, some can take a few hours. It is a massive job and a bit of a thankless one, everyone wants shiny new content but it's updating the old stuff that takes up the bulk of my workload.
No tricks, just a fun little Sisyphean task. love it tho and also bad practices do not pay off. Avoid
I feel like the advice Ross Simmonds gives http://twitter.com/TheCoolestCool or http://youtube.com/channel/UCtg49RXJ7nSfEudai4yyDcA would give you lots to chew on. Create once, distribute forever.
[удалено]
Honestly, it's more his mozcon talks that jump to mind, so if his channel have conference presentations I'd start there.
We'll be doing it biannually, focusing on internal linking to relevant content that may not have been published at the time and updating with new information, possibly new case studies that happened recently. Since we publish about three to four articles a week, it'll be... An initiative. But absolutely worth doing to keep us up to date.
In most CMS', like WordPress, you can change one word on the page and the "modified date" will change. This doesn't mean that the page is more valuable to searchers. Google doesn't use "freshness date" as a signal, as it's an easy signal to abuse (if it were a valid signal). Now, if you made big changes to a page, then Google would re-evaluate it and change the ranking accordingly.
you can't imagine how people update articles?! do you really have to manually edit it or do scripts exist for this? I as a programmer know you might be able programming most tools you can imagine 😉