FAQ

FAQ Page for Content Fulfillment

What all do you "refresh?"

We actually customize the rules of engagement by client, depending on their preferences, but the short answer is "a lot, actually." One of the most common candidates is, of course, the content itself, wherein you might dust off a 4 year old tutorial, make sure it's still relevant, then update the steps and information. But we also will take a look at other aspects of the URL (title, metadata, linking, technical SEO concerns, etc). You can see this in full effect by looking at our full list of refresh interventions.

How do you determine what to refresh?

We actually have purpose-built tooling for this (you can see here, if you want).

But methodologically, there are three main things that we take into consideration when looking at refresh opportunities:

1. Is the URL underperforming (ranking lower for its head keyword than our model would expect)?

2. Is the URL in a long-standing pattern of traffic decline?

3. Is the URL in a long-standing pattern of ranking loss?

All of these concerns speak to the central question of whether there is traffic potential associated with the URL and refreshing it, and we'll propose refreshes when we think there is. There may at times be other reasons to refresh URLs as well, but what we're talking about here is how we identify candidates from an algorithmic and SEO perspective.

Do refreshes always work?

Nope.

Obviously, I have more to say on that, but I wanted to make that crystal clear up front. They work more often than not, which is why you do them, but there are no guarantees. Sometimes refreshing the content has no impact and every now and then it actually seems to speed the decline.

Think of refreshes like hands of blackjack and you're the casino. The casino doesn't win every hand it plays. But it wins enough more than it loses to realize a return and have a viable business model. This is how batches of refreshes play out in aggregate. They won't all work, but they're almost always a net, combined positive. (And when they aren't, there's usually something else wrong, like general decline in topical interest)

What is the timeline for refreshes?

This can vary widely, from a few days to a few months. When you execute changes on a URL, within a few days, search engines will realize there are changes, re-crawl, and then be interested to see whether the searchers like these changes. This can often lead to immediate lift as they give the content more impressions to see how searchers react. Doubly so if searchers react well, sometimes leading to situations where you see sustained traffic boosts within a few days.

But on the flip side, sometimes nothing will happen, traffic-wise for a month or two, and then you'll see a gradual lift (or at least leveling off in decline).

Often the traffic increase to a URL that has gradually slid from the top spot in rankings will happen more quickly. The search engines historically like it and are waiting for an excuse to give it a boost. If, on the other hand, the content historically under-performed, then refreshing it is almost like publishing a new URL, and you need to give it time (though usually not quite as much time as a new URL).

But there are no gaurantees here. I'm just reporting common outcomes across thousands of these.

Would this be unnecessary if someone had just done it right the first time?

This is one of the more understandable sentiments that we'll field when talking to clients about refreshes. Either in the form of "did the old regime before us just do this wrong" or for a longstanding client "why didn't you, Hit Subscribe, optimize the first time around?"

The important thing to understand here is that for the search engines, URLs and pieces of content are living documents, or at least they should be, like a wiki or a reference corpus. So, in a sense, this is like asking if Wikipedia was suboptimal 4 years ago when they almost certainly had a somewhat different definition, for instance, of "Artificial Intelligence."

They weren't wrong and now they're right — the situation changed.

This is typically the case with content refreshes. The content ages, dates need to be updated, a list of the best tools of 2024 needs to become a best of 2025. But other things tend to happen as well, such as competitors that didn't previously exist targeting the keywords and making it harder to rank or searcher sophistication around a term changing. For instance, going back to the AI example, initial targeting of the term "LLM" probably favored basic definition content only and now features a more eclectic mix since way more people know what they are.

And another thing to bear in mind when refreshing is that "change is good." The larger the diff graph you create, the more noticeable to crawlers, and the more likely your shake up is to attract attention. So, like a large management consulting firm, you might be in there just kinda doing everything differently and hoping for the best.

In all seriousness, the main takeaway here should be that even a perfectly optimized post from a couple of years ago will no longer be perfectly optimized today.

Here's a video with a lot more detail, if you're interested.

Can you do this directly on our CMS?

Generally, yes, this is how we prefer to operate, especially if you're on Webflow or Wordpress. We deal with those all of the time. If you have something else or an SSG paradigm, we can probably SOP that out for you as well.

The reason it's best to give us the keys is so that we can handle technical SEO concerns on your behalf. This is a lot harder to do if we're submitting a Google doc to you with highlights on the editorial changes that we're suggesting. Because with something like, say, opening external links in a new tab, we can't implement that in the Google doc and have to instead give you homework and a reference DIY guide.

That said, we can do either and we recognize that it can sometimes be more of a pain to provision CMS access than to DIY.