I tell my four-year-old nieces all the time, “If it lives, it dies,” and that applies to the content on your website, too.
Today, we’re talking about content decay and how it affects your website’s SEO.
You know what content decay is even if you haven’t heard of it before: your SEO-optimized content, once as profoundly magnificent as Michelangelo’s David, begins its slow, inevitable descent into utter oblivion due to the raging forces of nature we’ll call “competition on Google.”
My nieces usually stop listening right about here.
The fact is, every piece of content you produce has a lifespan, that is, if you publish it and never touch it again. Times change, markets innovate, and eventually, what you wrote three years ago or even one is outdated, and people aren’t turning to it for information anymore.
While content decay is a problem for all of us in the SEO world, that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. As a website owner, you have the chance to breathe new life into much of your older content to make it relevant again.
You’ll just have to decide which content to rescue and which might actually be better off going the way of the dinosaurs.
I’m going to help you with that. First, we’ll learn about content decay. Then, I’ll teach you the sorcery you need to bring that content back to life.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- What Is Content Decay?
- What Causes Content Decay?
- Analyzing Your Content Decay
- How to Save Decayed Content
- Bottom Line
What Is Content Decay?
Content decay is the gradually decreasing traffic and organic rankings of a piece of content over time, often corresponding to the content’s drop in relevance.
If you’ve spent any amount of time publishing online content, you likely know how this goes. The content might garner your website thousands of new visitors in the period immediately following its publication. And that new boost in traffic might sustain itself for a while, weeks, or even months.
Eventually, though, the traffic tends to drop off, and the content, once in its prime, becomes the dried-up orange in the back of the fridge.
It can be incredibly frustrating to see the hard work you put into your content enjoy such a relatively short cycle of success before pretty much vanishing from the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The thing is, if you think about the situation from the perspective of Google and its users, it actually makes sense that this should eventually happen to the content we produce.
What Causes Content Decay?
So, why does content decay at all?
I mean, we could ask the same of the Elephant’s Foot from Chernobyl or that potholed part of I-84 I took this weekend: decay is simply the endless march of time breaking things down more and more the longer they exist.
With content on Google, the same concept applies, but now we need to know why something that was once popular would start decaying in the first place. I’ve seen this happen a bunch in my SEO career, so let’s look at some reasons for content decay.
Google core updates
Here in the SEO space, we’ve known for a long time that Google’s core updates, although ultimately beneficial for searchers trying to find relevant information, can really do a number on web pages’ organic rankings.
As Google itself has said, core updates fulfill the search giant’s mission of providing the most helpful content to users. Regularly reassessing and reshuffling the content on its SERPs is just a natural part of doing that.
Take Google’s March 2024 core update as an example. Among other things, the update de-ranked low-quality and unhelpful content that appeared to be targeting keywords and search engine rankings instead of actually trying to help people. By the end of the update rollout in April 2024, Google announced searchers could expect a 45% reduction in unhelpful content on the SERPs.
Okay, so that got rid of a lot of unoriginal content out there. Great.
The problem was that many other pages that seemed genuinely helpful also lost rankings and then fluctuated for a while before finally settling down, only lower than where they were before.
In that situation, we can say many websites’ content decayed due to new helpfulness standards from Google.
Again, we’ll talk about how to save decaying content later. For now, it will suffice to say that Google decided your content wasn’t as helpful as some other stuff out there.
Which leads me to the next item.
Competitor content
Oh, if only we could have Google’s SERPs all to ourselves, a blank slate for publishing whatever we wanted to a global audience of billions.
Problem is, if your business is trying to make money from something, chances are good that a few million others out there are trying the same thing. And no matter your industry, if you’re savvy about your overall marketing strategy, you know producing original content is one way to bring customers into your sales funnel and see you as a trustworthy industry expert.
So, with all this content competing for the top rankings on Google, you can expect your content to change rankings over time. Competitors who come along and produce more relevant and helpful content will naturally dethrone your content from any lofty search positions it’s achieved in the past.
As for how competitors could do that, it could be that their SEO strategy involves targeting more relevant keywords. Or maybe they’re taking a more comprehensive approach to the content topic. It could also be that they’re including more up-to-date information that has emerged since you published your content.
Now that’s an interesting point…
Out-of-date content
Innovation and change occur all the time in our society. As it does, it’s the role of your web content to reflect the most current happenings in any given area so users leave feeling fully informed.
That’s what Google wants, and it’s what you should want, too.
Content that doesn’t reflect the latest unfoldings of a topic could end up being misleading to people, and Google is likely to de-rank it, causing decay.
Say you run a health-resources blog and you’re writing a history of public health crises in the United States. You publish it in November 2019 to extraordinary traffic and excellent rankings.
Then March 2020 arrives.
By later that year, your competitors update their histories to include the COVID-19 pandemic, but you leave your content alone.
Now, searchers who want the most complete information on the topic won’t go to your content because it doesn’t consider all the facts.
Those searchers will judge with their clicks and navigate elsewhere, and over time, Google will see this and de-rank you.
Your formerly glorious content has decayed.
RIP.
Changing search intent
In SEO, we understand that keywords and queries have different search intent behind them, which is to say, searchers want to be shown different kinds of results based on what they search. It’s up to content producers to answer those calls with relevant content.
There are four types of search intent:
- Informational
- Commercial
- Transactional
- Navigational
SEOs can tell a query’s intent by the organic results it produces on Google. For example, informational searches usually yield blog posts and videos, while transactional searches turn up products for sale.
Your content should match the intent of the search so you show users what they want to see. If your content doesn’t match, it likely won’t rank for that particular keyword.
The catch here is that search intent can actually change over time, and if it does, your once high-ranking content can become irrelevant and start decaying.
Say you got into a certain market while it was still developing and there wasn’t much literature published about it. Therefore, most searches for that topic turned up a piece of informational content you wrote.
But over time, as the public caught up and Google started understanding more about the topic, those same searches now yielded commercial results for people looking to compare products. And what happened? Your content started tumbling down the rankings in a fashion not unlike that of Jill, of Jack and Jill fame.
That’s an example of how the ways in which people search can affect your content’s rankings.
Reduced search interest
Finally, your content can decay over time due simply to waning interest in a topic.
You might wonder why a content topic would suddenly become less relevant to people over time, but think about it. How many revolutionary developments of the past are now obsolete? Would you expect to see a lot of interest in content comparing the best pagers or floppy disks to buy?
Or, in a more contemporary and less hilarious example, you may produce newsworthy content as part of a news site and experience frequent content decay, since public interest in certain topics tends to rise and fall quite regularly.
When it seems the public has moved on permanently from a timely topic, your content may be doomed to decay, fated to finish, and cursed to collapse.
Analyzing Your Content Decay
Before we get to the methods you can use to save your decayed content, let’s get more specific on why certain competitors may have outranked you at all.
I mentioned above that your competitors may have come along with content that targeted more relevant keywords or offered more complete information. You can actually analyze why Google might have favored someone else’s content over yours by performing a SERP audit.
Just as it sounds, a SERP audit involves examining the search results that perform better than your content to evaluate why Google favored them over you.
Here’s a checklist of items to look at as you go through results that recently started outranking you:
- Content type – What kind of content is outranking you? Are you the only sales page in a sea of blog posts? Is Google showing video results over your blog? Is a blog post discussing 25 tips for doing a thing while you’re only handing out 12? The gap between what’s outranking you and what you’re offering could be the deciding factor that caused the decay.
- Keyword relevance and difficulty – We talked about search intent above. If your competitor’s target keyword and topic focus are more closely related to the search query than your own, Google may have seen that content as more helpful to people. Also, pay attention to keyword difficulty. You can use SEO tools such as Semrush or Ahrefs to see how difficult a keyword will be to rank for on a scale of 1 to 100 (higher is more difficult). More difficult keywords tend to be the more basic and commonly used ones. More specific keywords are often easier to rank for even if they have less monthly search volume. If you’re facing fierce competition for a difficult keyword, you may be able to retarget your content to an easier keyword to get seen by audiences that are fewer in number but perhaps more ready to act.
- Metadata – You know metadata as the text that populates the results on the SERPs. Meta titles hold direct SEO value with Google, which is why we optimize them with keywords. Meta descriptions don’t hold the same value, but they’re vital nonetheless as they’re your chance to pitch your customers before they even click anything. It’s possible your competitors used more relevant keywords in their meta titles or a more engaging message in their meta description. Compare theirs to yours to see the disparities.
- SERP features – SERPs contain other elements besides those 10 blue links. There’s information from sources across the web, featured snippets, knowledge panels, paid ads, local map results, and so much more. It’s pretty common for this kind of stuff to outrank organic results, and through no fault of yours. But maybe a competitor targeted a featured snippet with their content and it worked. Suddenly, they’re in position 0 while you’re down at 1 or 2. You can try to dethrone them by answering the query even more comprehensively yet concisely.
How to Save Decayed Content
Now, even given all of that, the good news is that you can actually reanimate some of your deceased content. Not in a cool, zombie-type way (your blog posts won’t become walkers, shamblers, or shufflers), but in ways that can start to earn traffic to your website again.
Here are some methods for rescuing decayed content.
1. Update the content
One way to go about it is to update your content. You’d want to audit all the content on your site to determine what, if anything, can be updated with new information to make it relevant to contemporary searches.
Google likes websites that frequently update and refresh their information for modern audiences. It shows they’re trustworthy because they keep up with the times and want to continue delivering useful content experiences for people.
If you’ve been producing content for a long time and have lost rankings and traffic on some amazing pieces of the past, it could be worth it to examine your repository for anything you can touch up with new information.
Take the above example of the health blog with its history of public health crises in the United States. This is prime content for updating because the passage of time has given society more perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic that the writer can now work into the narrative. That way, when people want the most comprehensive content on the topic, this piece has a chance to rank again.
2. Modernize the content
Sometimes, you might write content that’s more or less evergreen but still appears outdated by its references, external links, and title, even if not much about the topic has really changed from then to now.
If you wrote “Your Ultimate Guide to Forming an LLC in California [2023],” and traffic to it decreased as 2023 made way for 2024, you have a golden opportunity to modernize any of its outdated parts for 2024, replace some older links with newer ones, and slap a “2024” in the title right over the “2023.”
You’d also want to check if any state laws have changed around LLC formation since you wrote your original piece.
Pro tip: if you write content with a year in the title, don’t include the year in the content’s URL. Keep it general so it’s never outdated.
3. Refresh the content’s UX
RiZen Metrics is a user-first digital marketing agency. That means we consider good UX/UI to be vital to producing helpful content.
One approach you can take while updating decayed content is to optimize the page’s user experience. Maybe the competition has overtaken your content on the SERPs because the experience of reading their work is more enjoyable or relevant to users.
The competition’s content may load faster or feature more interesting visuals, while yours loads slowly and features intimidating walls of text without media to break it up. Maybe their content links out to helpful additional reading while your content doesn’t link anywhere.
Think of how your ideal user is likely experiencing your content and optimize the page from there. What would you want to see if you were consuming this content?
4. Write all-new content
In some cases, you can even write all-new content around a topic if enough time has passed and the topic is radically different from where you originally left it.
It seems okay to me to update a blog post from last year or a few years ago. But if you covered something on your blog a long, long time ago that was relevant at the time but is now completely something else, it might be worth it to let that go and write an updated post about the topic from nothing.
A May 9, 2024, episode of Google’s Search Off the Record podcast backs this up. In it, tech writer on Google’s Search-Rel team Lizzi Sassman and search relations lead John Mueller say the following:
[00:06:19:03] – John
That’s an Interesting point. 2005. That’s almost 20 years now. That’s pretty cool. Two decades of decay. Yeah. I think with regards to blog posts in particular and any kind of news or time, I don’t know what you would call it, like time-associated content, that feels like the kind of thing you’d almost want to keep just as a historical reference even.
[00:06:43:01] – Lizzi
I agree. I think from a research or archival perspective, we want to keep that with the original publish date. Even if we did update it, like, I don’t know, we’ve announced something and then there’s an update to that thing or we want to put a notice, I still want to retain the original piece of content as it was, in case we need to look back or refer to it, and to change it or rehabilitate it into a new thing would almost be worth republishing as a new blog post if we had that much additional things to say about it.
[00:07:19:08] – John
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, especially with blog posts. It’s like, I don’t know, if we publish something in 2005 and we changed it last year, that would feel kind of weird to just rewrite the blog post. It’s almost like you’re rewriting history.
Obviously, it will be up to the discretion of the writer to decide what can merely be updated and what deserves an all-new post. It’s probably best to keep in mind Lizzi’s and John’s advice not to make it look like you’re altering real history as you covered it back then.
5. Eliminate content
One final option here is to cull from your website any significantly outdated content that no longer serves a purpose on your site.
This may apply more to websites that have been publishing content for, say, more than 10 years, but it could also be relevant to sites that publish content in great volume.
Google regularly recrawls websites, and when you have a lot of content clogging your archives, you end up wasting what’s called your crawl budget. That’s the resources Google will expend to explore your site. You want a quick and easy crawl, but that proves difficult when you force Google to pore through thousands of useless content pages.
The answer is to eliminate content from your site that you don’t need, or at the very least, take some time to combine similar posts together.
Remember, Google can more easily reward you with rankings if it can actually understand what your site is about.
Bonus tip: leave it alone
You know, there is also the wisdom of doing absolutely nothing about your problems and seeing what happens.
The fact is that, sometimes, Google just wants new stuff at #1 for a query. You may have dominated the SERPs for a certain search for a really long time, but in some cases, that decay is just oh so real, and you ain’t coming back no matter what you do.
If that happens to you, we can say that content has reached its maturity and probably won’t be shooting up the rankings again like it could in its younger days. And I’d advise you not to continue pouring resources into a task that just won’t bear fruit. Focus your efforts on producing new content. That’s always a good thing.
Bottom Line
As I usually end my conversations with my four-year-old nieces: the heavy hand of time waits for none of us. Given enough time, all online content can become outdated…IF you leave it alone.
Google loves websites that regularly refresh and update their content for contemporary searchers. With that in mind, you can regain some lost rankings by heading down to the morgue, taking the decayed content that is the most primed for new life, and electrifying it with all-new wisdom and relevance.
You heard it here.
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