Can You Recycle a Blog Post Without Hurting SEO? Part 1

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. It’s not just for paper and plastic anymore. If you write a blog, you may want to try applying it to your posts as the years go by. But you’ve heard this is a bad thing to do, right? Let’s try an experiment.

Step 1: Select a Post

I decided to choose a blog post whose content seemed evergreen (still relevant) two years after the original post. I also wanted to choose a post that was only moderately popular at best when originally published. Why mess with something already doing well, right? I used the exact same text, title and graphics as the original post, so the only work involved was the recycling process.

Danger of Duplicate Content

Anybody that knows SEO knows that Google doesn’t like duplicate content. Having duplicate content opens your website up to being punished by Google, which can take weeks to repair. Common sense tells most people that having duplicate content on a website on purpose is an attempt to game the system, and most people know that Google can and will see right through that.

Step 2: Erase the Original

With this in mind, the first step in recycling a blog post is erasing the original blog post. You should do this as well in advance of your planned ‘re-posting’ as possible, especially if the post isn’t generating any traffic. I erased the one for this experiment about 3 weeks in advance. Erasing the post from your website is only one third of the battle. You must also tell Google to forget about it. In Google’s Webmaster Tools, under optimization, use the Remove URLs tool to request that Google erase your old post’s URL from it’s index.