So this week, I went back and shortened one considerably and reposted it.

My question is how is duplicate content determined. If you cut a post by several paragraphs and change the headline, is it duplicate?

Mind you, I’m not talking about doing a George Lucas-style overhaul, just minor tweaks and most often, it’s to provide a link forward to a newer, related post – kind of like reverse deep-linking. And when I do update older posts, I usually indicate it with a little red “Update” notation, so it’s more apparent. (You can take a look at my FiveFingers For Your Ten Toes article for an example.)

@Outlet – I would not advise deleting old posts, as that will break any incoming links to those posts. Instead as Darren suggests, try updating the content and following the guidelines to update the post instead of deleting it.

For a diary/journal, leaving old posts as they were will show “what you knew then”, as people has mentioned.

For more knowledge-oriented sites like this where you try to help people with more “generic” information, you SHOULD update your old posts. If not, you should consider deleting posts that are no longer accurate or useful.

But is it still a “blog” when you go back to edit old articles :-) ?

I’ve been going through my site the past month and a half or so, and have started weeding out old posts that no longer add value to the site.

dead links, a mess, no search value – gone.

i’ve probably eliminated a few hundred posts already, and have taken away from the value of the blog in terms of usability.

on the flip side of that – I’ve been “sprucing things up” as I go… interlinking appropriate “like” articles, making sure video links work, attribution is given, etc.

the hope is that the archives become a better tool, rather than just being google bait with diminishing value.

One thing I have considered also is to make some of the most useful resources into blog pages rather than just posts, so they are more accessible and available and easy to find for new users. Since the great majority of my readership is organic search traffic, making everything more easily available and refreshing old posts seems very important.

I’m also really interested in someone’s idea above for a plug in that notifies me of broken links…need to do some searching in the WP plug in directory I guess.

Thanks everyone.

Lately, I’ve been doing it more and more for SEO purposes, so that Google doesn’t think that a post has been orphaned.

I consider my blog a historical record on 19th century furniture and want it to be as complete and accurate as possible.

If it is major enough, I’ll do a new post pointing out the old “error”.