Six months of publishing nothing but updates to old content — what happened

Froze all new publishing on one site in April. 180 existing articles, zero new ones for six months. All effort went into updating what was already there.

Result: organic sessions up 61%, revenue up 44%.

Caveats before anyone sends this to their boss: the site was four years old with a lot of genuinely stale content, so there was low-hanging fruit everywhere. A one-year-old site has nothing to update.

What actually moved the needle, roughly in order:

• Merging thin pages that competed with each other
• Rewriting intros that buried the answer
• Replacing dead outbound links and screenshots of interfaces that no longer exist
• Adding the one section each article was obviously missing

The last one sounds vague but it was the biggest. Read your own article as someone who came from the search result and notice what you did not answer.

The merge work is underrated. Two pages at position 14 become one page at position 6 more often than people expect.

61% with zero new content is a strong argument for the portfolios I keep buying being worth more than they look.

Did you keep the old URLs on the merges or redirect into a new one?

Redirected into whichever of the two had the better link profile, then rewrote that page to cover both intents. Never created a new URL.

Noted that this does not apply to me yet. Appreciate you saying that out loud.

Interesting that revenue lagged sessions. Usually means the recovered traffic is higher-funnel than the original.

Exactly that. Informational intent recovered faster than commercial, which was mildly annoying.