Why You Should Not Be Updating Old Blog Posts
While browsing, I think, the #Blogging hashtag on social media, I ran across someone explaining why you should be updating old blog posts, and against my better judgment I’m going to push back on this from a couple of different angles. It’s worth noting that there are different ways to take the word ”update”, and my issue here is with theirs.
By that I mean that, of course, I do update old blogs posts, but only by adding a section of addenda to the bottom, and it’s extraordinarily unusual for there to be a case where I’d do that beyond a few days past when the post was published. Outside of that timeframe, I simply write a new post and link to the old one. This approach is strengthened by my system of internal backlinks, such that any older post I link from a newer one then links back to that newer one. Anyone stumbling across an old post easily can see that there are later contributions which might advance the matter at hand.
That’s not the sort of updating being advocated in the piece linked above. There are four reasons they suggest updating old posts: relevancy, evolving content, fresh social content, and SEO. This last is your clue to what we’re dealing with here: content marketing. The scourge of the blogging form.
After explaining how to find old content that should be updated (basically, posts people don’t visit much anymore), they describe the process:
Once you have worked out what posts you will be updating, copy the post content into a Google Sheet or Word document. Start by updating any dates, and highlight any areas that you could find newer research, quotes, etc.
Now look for sections that could be expanded upon, or improved in some way. Is there a section within your post that could be turned into a infographic or table of data? You could create these and add them to those sections.
To put it plainly: this is not even blogging.
Content marketing like this is just maintaining a website using a blogging CMS. Outside of content marketing, in the world of personal websites this approach might be termed a digital garden, where instead of posts, per se, you have pages that you nurture and prune as you see fit, as your thinking about a page topic evolves over time.
It’s just not blogging.
Melinda, who isn’t in direct conversation with the above content marketer (it’s just that I saw these two posts within a day of each other), notes that blogging used to be different.
Ten years ago if you were blogging on Tumblr or Wordpress you were writing to an audience in an attempt to promote something. Your blog would have a theme, a niche, and a sales funnel. Blog every single day about food, cars, videogames, whatever and at the end remind the reader to buy your book or t-shirts. They worked just like Substack would today. "Make money being a blogger!" "Here are the top ten ways to blog!" "Blogging is dead! Long Live Blogging!" "My free ebook teaches you how to blog!"
What’s being described here, of course, is content marketing, which along with the advent of social media threatened to put an end to blogging as a form for people. The combination certainly made the blogosphere less of a thing. For a time, this is what people thought about when someone said the word “blog”, and it sucked. They were never blogs. Not really. They were just websites, and they were shilling something at you, and trying to game search engines for profit at the expense of what the form really meant to the rest of us.
Rebecca Blood’s seminal The Weblog Handbook (which along with The Elements of Journalism guided how I thought about my work when I was doing stand-alone journalism via blog), included a section on weblog ethics. Of note for us here is item number four: “Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry.”
Changing or deleting entries destroys the integrity of the network. The Web is designed to be connected; indeed, the weblog permalink is an invitation for others to link. Anyone who comments on or cites a document on the Web relies on that document (or entry) to remain unchanged. A prominent addendum is the preferred way to correct any information anywhere on the Web. If an addendum is impractical, as in the case of an essay that contains numerous inaccuracies, changes must be noted with the date and a brief description of the nature of the change.
Content marketers ignore this ethical stricture, and it’s one of the main reasons they aren’t actually bloggers.
To be clear: when it comes to personal blogging, I do think it’s fair game to delete an entry outright. I don’t think as a personal blogger you owe anyone, or the network, a post’s continued presence. Sometimes you might write a thing that you just need not out there anymore, and even explaining why it too high an ask. You’re allowed to say how you present yourself to the world.
What a content marketer of the sort I started with here is doing, however, is maintaining URLs but changing what appears at them. This is something that websites do all the time—say, when an “about” page or a policy document changes. But blogs, specifically, should strenuously try to avoid this. Blogging is narrating yourself and your interests over time because we are story itself. The form arguably dictates that the answer to “but there’s new information” or “but I have new thoughts” or “but something new happened” simply is to write a new post.
I’ve said it before: Kevin Lawver is right that blogging is the great empathy engine of the web. This is something content marketing never understood and nearly chased off the internet in its SEO grind and salesman hustle. Content marketing is a lonely, soulless thing, but as Manu says, blogging is not meant to be. You are not content to market. You are a whole person, and we’re here for it: to see you, and to hear you, post by post by post.
Addenda
- At the risk of ruining the flow of my ending there, I neglected to mention two things: (1) blog posts are not meant to be “evergreen” (to use a popular content marketer concept) because (2) “blog” comes from “web log”—and a log entry is a discrete temporal unit. The nature of the form is that you “log” something, and you don’t go back and change entries in a log.