Facebook Pixel
Join our Facebook Community

Google’s Mobilegeddon: The Best Excuse to Repurpose Old Content

Posted By Guest Blogger 27th of May 2015 General 0 Comments

Google’s Mobilegeddon: The Best Excuse to Repurpose Old ContentThis is a guest contribution from Mike Canarelli.

For bloggers looking to refresh or repurpose old content, after the April 21 release of Google’s “mobile-friendly” update comes at the perfect time and offers tremendous benefits.

Gloomier prognosticators have nicknamed the update “MOBILEGEDDON” (yes, typically in all caps) because of its potential to disrupt 40% of all online searches—specifically those queried from mobile devices.

What these doom-and-gloomers have forgotten to consider, however, is that because the update applies to individual web pages, as opposed to entire websites, bloggers with mobile sites now have the chance to showcase stale or outdated content by refreshing their posts with new or updated tweaks. For bloggers still working on becoming mobile compliant, the update will allow them the opportunity to build a content refresh right into their website redesign plans.

Let’s face it: not only is high quality content time-consuming and costly to produce, none of it remains relevant forever. When Google says it’s going to highlight some of the best content you’ve produced by re-indexing it for mobile, it would be foolish to waste the opportunity and not update it.

Breathe New Life into Old Content

Above all, when creating content the first time around, try to image how you might repurpose it at a later date. With that in mind, here are some important things to consider when refreshing and repurposing existing content:

Updates

Simply providing new insights on original posts can allow you to reuse blog content and articles. For example, if you wrote an article on the five most important weapons to have during the zombie apocalypse, you could just break each of those five weapons down into five different in-depth writes-ups on each item. This is an easy way to score big points with the Googlebot, which is constantly looking for new, properly formatted pages that are relevant to your site’s general theme.

Presentations

Take information from a post, turn it into a presentation and post your slides to social sites like SlideShare, Issuu, and Docstoc for additional amplification. Google loves presentations, and if you include links to your mobile site in these repurposed slides, you’ll benefit from additional optimization. One word of caution, though: Google does not index presentations stored in its own Google Docs platform, so even if your presentation is stored there and marked “public,” the search giant won’t include it in search results. No biggie: just be sure to publish your presentations to a third party site (like those referenced above), and you’ll be good to go.

Repost

If your content is timeless and consequently doesn’t need much tweaking or refreshing, you might want to consider sharing it across your social media channels a second time. Surprisingly, research suggests that reposting a piece of content can earn up to 75% of the engagement of the original post. Be careful, though: only repost LINKS to your content. Reposting an entire blog to a social media site like LinkedIn and/or a social journalism site like Medium can actually earn you a duplication penalty from Google, which will kill your traffic.

eBooks

Create one ore more eBooks out of a series of blog posts. eBooks can be sold, given away, or gated behind forms to capture visitor contact info. Google actually has a partner program called Google Books that will index your eBook and make it searchable. Best of all, you can control how much of your eBook people can browse, so you’re not giving the whole thing away without some return benefits.

Multimedia

Freshen it up and create a podcast or video series. Webinars are also becoming increasingly popular, so check out your old content to see if there is anything you can use as a webinar. You can also create a podcast and video from the same piece of content, thus earning the indexing benefit of all three (audio, video and your original post). Don’t be overzealous, though: The Googlebot creates a written transcript of the video for its search index, so if you have one, too, it could get you penalized for duplicate content. 

Know When to Let Go

Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to hold on to content. If it’s no longer timely, or new information has made it incorrect or no longer applicable, it might be time to say goodbye. If you can incorporate into other content you’ll have the benefit of removing dated work from your site while also updating and refreshing content with staying power.

Whatever method you choose to repurpose or refresh your content, the Mobilegeddon update should be top of mind. People on the go are the ones who are consuming the most content, and they’re consuming it on their mobile devices. Imagine your readers, viewers or listeners where they actually are—at airports, waiting in line, or scrolling around at their leisure. If you do this, taking advantage of Google’s new update will go hand in hand with refreshing your content.

Mike Canarelli is the CEO and Co-Founder of Web Talent Marketing, a full-service digital marketing agency based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania that delivers exceptional results to clients. 

About Guest Blogger
This post was written by a guest contributor. Please see their details in the post above.
Comments
  1. Wow! Some really cool ideas to repurpose the old content.thanks problogger

  2. Brilliant advice – thank you for this. I have a site that I have been struggling to update simply due to lack of time, but which has loads of content on it already. These are great ideas and I can already see how I can apply some of them to the existing content that I have.

    • Heather,

      If your site is built on WordPress, there’s a “WordPress content scheduling plugin” free of charge available to download from WordPress.org. By writing “lots and lots of content” ahead of time before starting your workday and scheduling it, you’ll stay on your content marketing A-game. If you have additional questions, please feel free to post one on the site after signing up.

  3. Repurposing content is a great way to stay relevant in the search engines and discover new affiliate revenue.

  4. Hi Mike,

    I have been HUGE on the eBook thing. For the past month I have grabbed old posts of mine and beefed each up to eBook length. I publish to Kindle and of course, link in to these posts are I publish the eBook review/release post to my blog. Win-win for everybody because my readers get a dirt cheap, valuable resource and I open a passive income stream.

    I’ve also updated all of my old posts by crunching image sizes – better speed on mobile devices – and also I am linking in quite a bit, as well as linking out to authority blogs from my niche. My timing was excellent; I gave little thought to making these updates as Mobile Geddon took root lol ;) Serendipity I suppose ;) Nice tips Mike!

    Ryan

    • Ryan,

      Do you feel e-Book marketing has helped boost your SEO? Checked out your rankings on Alexa.com and you’re kinda slacking right now in the U.S.

  5. It seems that Google has just pointed out that mobile devices are becoming a big part of the online environment. It’s certainly going to be a bigger influence in the future. Not that mobile devices wont be capable of showing desktop sites, it will be that the display will have to be adapted and sometimes content needs to be adjusted to suit the consumer of that information on a mobile device. The holy grail of this is a responsive site but that is not always possible.

  6. Repurposing substance is an awesome approach to stay significant in the Internet Search & most in Google Search Engine and find new partner income, great share on use of old content keep it up problogger.

    – Sneha

  7. Great advice here! I think all of the new options for saving and sharing information on the internet is so amazing. Imagine describing some of the things in the post to yourself from ten years ago, even!

    • I think creating videos and turning your popular blog posts into Infographics is the surefire way to breath life into old blog posts.

      Also make sure to get a responsive design for your site if you want to increase rankings for your websites after the update from Google regarding the mobile responsiveness.

  8. Great article – I have just started re-purposing content due to running out of ideas for new, fresh content – just bookmarked to refer back to!

  9. Love this. The frugal part of me loves recycling, not letting anything go to waste. I’ll dig deep back into my blog to some popular posts I’d love to recycle. Thanks for the great advice,

  10. Thanks for Great resource. I got some new ideas to Repurpose my Old Content.

  11. Hello, Mike!

    Great advice for content repurposing. Truth is, most of us rarely look back and it’s even more rare to look back AND decide to re-market successful old content.

    What I want to point out, in this case, is about the presentations, hosted on Google Drive. I did a test during 2014 to see if the slides will count as a link from Google itself. Did not work as expected, but the presentation is still active, set to public and visible in the search results. Even the anchor text is showing, if I add it in quotation marks.

    Just wanted to give a heads up, maybe the problem was somewhere else in your case. :)

    Cheers, keep up the great work!

    Matilde.

  12. Thanks for sharing best information.. after reading this article i got an idea about Repurposing content.. Thanks a lot

  13. Nice post. Thanks for sharing all these tips, now I got the idea and I am going repurpose content…!!

  14. Since the mobilegeddon, i get more traffic from Google,maybe because i always update my old content.
    BTW thanks for sharing

  15. Alastair James says: 06/01/2015 at 11:33 pm

    These is really a Usefull updates for web design Companies who works on mainly website and mobile app development.
    Mobilegeddon Is Beginning, Not Ending.The Mobile Friendly Update has now fully rolled out according to Google. hvantage technologies has also updates their work according to its new algorithem updated by google.

  16. Best update tips for website designing and mobile development you have shared here. I also changed my content on my site so help in getting more traffic

  17. Thanks, everyone, for the great feedback. One other item I failed to mention regarding repurposing content is repurposing it into traditional marketing materials. The reason I didn’t mention this is because, obviously, when you take content offline, it no longer helps your rankings or search marketing. It does, however, help you to build brand awareness. If you find that your content no longer serves a purpose online, maybe you can rework it and add it to a brochure, mailer or traditional ad. Just a thought.

  18. Hello Mike
    I like your post. The tips on updates is very useful. I like the “Know When to Let Go” tip this is really helping me. Re-posting is also very effective tip. Thank you for uploading the post and sharing your knowledge.
    Thanks

  19. Hi..
    Thank you for posting this blog and sharing the information about the content . content is the king and really this is a cool ideas to re-purpose the old content.

    thank you

  20. Thanks for all these valuable tips. Now i will apply these tips to my newly launched website.

  21. Informative blog.It was nice to read it.
    Thankyou for sharing

A Practical Podcast… to Help You Build a Better Blog

The ProBlogger Podcast

A Practical Podcast…

Close
Open