Updating content for the new year

Updating your content for 2025

One issue we see again and again in our SEO audits is sites with content that is out of date, often YEARS out of date. Google likes fresh content and old content can be actively hurting your site.

We see this type of issue commonly with affiliate and content sites that have a lot of “best of” posts which are typically dated for that year. For example “Best Travel Backpacks for 2024” like the screenshot below.

Given it’s 2025, Google will start to de-rank this content as users are less likely to click on posts dated 2024 even if they do show up in the search results.

For other types of sites we’ll often see news posts or updates that are years out of date and completely irrelevant still on the site which again is harmful for SEO.

You can also see in the screenshot some of the posts have a title tag with 2025 in it but the date of the post is 2024, again not ideal.

A simple way to audit for this type of content is using Google search itself by running the search:

“2024” site:domain.com

For the example in the screenshot:

“2024” site:gearjunkie.com

This will return all the posts with the date 2024 in them.

The date will need to be updated in several places like the title tag, h1 heading tag and the content itself. For highly competitive content it may also be worth updating the publish date to 2025 so old dates aren’t showing in the search results like above. For obsolete and old content, most often the solution is to just delete it and let it 404 out. In some cases, if the post is still getting traffic, redirecting it to another relevant post may be a better option.

If you have a bigger site or want to take this to the next level, using Screaming Frog SEO Spider and its custom search function will crawl your site and look for the strings you tell it to search, for example “2024” in SEO title tags. Instructions to do that are here.

New Google Search Audit Service

Since mid 2024 we’ve been getting an increasing number of customers with issues in Google Search Console. It seems with the rise of AI, Google has been crawling sites much more aggressively and as a result, more errors are appearing for sites in Search Console and look something like below – a lot of pages crawled but not many indexed.

To combat this, we’ve just launched a new service that will audit both your Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and give you an action plan to fix these items.

This is essentially a SEO audit based on the data in Search Console and can help uncover hidden problems and missed opportunities.

With this service we do a deep dive review on your Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to identify technical SEO issues, crawl errors, broken links, canonical SEO problems and indexation issues and create a detailed action plan to fix these problems.

The service also includes 3 months access to our Vital Signs Tracker site speed tracking tool to help monitor your site speed and our SimpleUptime uptime monitoring tool which will help monitor your uptime and reliability.

The cost of this service is $995 but until the end of January we’re discounting the service to $750 using the coupon code AUDIT

The audit is in the same style as our full SEO audit and site speed audit – you can see example screenshots here and here

To purchase, click this link and enter the coupon code AUDIT in the top right hand corner.

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