Keep your content fresh and up to date
As Google strives to show its users the best and most up-to-date information, you should keep track of your content and revise it regularly because you don’t want to show your website visitors outdated, redundant or incorrect information.
This is easier said than done if you publish regularly and have hundreds or thousands of blog posts. That’s why we’d advise focusing on two specific areas for content maintenance: updating cornerstone content and preventing keyword cannibalization.
2.4.2. Update your cornerstone content
Some pages on your site are more important than others. The most valuable content of your site is called cornerstone content. We’ve written extensively about cornerstone articles and how they can improve your rankings.
In short, these posts or pages:
- contain essential information for your audience;
- are complete, up-to-date, and well-written;
- show authority;
- get the most links from related posts within your site;
- rank higher than your other articles on the same topic;
- get the most organic traffic to your site.
Always prioritize your cornerstone content when you doubt where to start updating your site’s content. Your business relies on them, and they should never go stale!
2.4.3. No outdated cornerstones with Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO makes it a little easier to keep your cornerstones up to date. You can mark a post as a cornerstone article if you use Yoast SEO on your site. In doing so, these articles will undergo a more rigorous SEO analysis. In addition, they’ll appear in a separate list in your post overview, which makes it easy to browse through them and check if they’re still up to scratch.
Keeping track of them is even easier if you’re on Yoast SEO Premium. The Stale cornerstone content filter only shows your cornerstone articles that haven’t been updated in the last six months. You’ll find this filter in your post overview. If it doesn’t show any posts, you’re good, and if there are one or more posts in it, make sure you check and update them!
2.4.4. Keyword cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization means you’re eating away your rankings by creating too many articles for the same or similar keywords. For example, if you have a dozen articles on the same topic, search engines don’t know which one they should rank highest. As a result, you’ll compete with your articles for a high position in the search engines.
If you frequently publish, as we do at Yoast, you’re bound to run into keyword cannibalization issues someday. That’s why we’ve created a framework for dealing with keyword cannibalism. In short, you’ll have to:
- Find out for which keywords it’s happening;
- Analyze which content performs best for those keywords;
- Keep the best-performing posts;
- Decide if you should merge the other posts into the better-performing one;
- Or delete and redirect them.
Check out this detailed guide on how to fix keyword cannibilization issues on your site to learn how to go about this.
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