Refresh Interventions

Invisible Hygiene

These are interventions that fall under the category of invisible hygiene.

Add High Authority, Non-Competitive External Links If Absent

Generally, you want your site and its individual URLs to have a natural, healthy backlink profile. The main thing you want to avoid with links is doing things that look weird or suspicious, and having no external links on your site would look weird or suspicious. So your posts should have outbound links for that reason and also because having outbound links to high authority site is you sending a signal of "I do research and cite sources."

These are, to be clear, fairly minor SEO concerns. But good SEO hygiene involves having outbound, 200 high authority links, so we'll generally throw one in during a refresh if you don't have any on the page. But don't worry; we won't link to your competitors or to competitive URLs when doing this.

Add Internal Links

Internal linking is extremely important, both for SEO and for any crawls of your site more broadly (e.g. Answer Engine crawlers). The internal links you have on your site to a given URL, the more you're boosting that URL with so-called "page-rank" and the more crawlers will encounter it. So if your site features a "What is DevOps" blog post, linking to that URL anytime you mention DevOps on your site signals to crawlers and search engines that the blog post in question is an authoritative definition of DevOps.

Accordingly, anytime we do a refresh, we opportunistically add at least a few internal links, often to URLs that have been published in the time after you published the one we're refreshing.

Add Valid Alt Text

Alt text is a property of images that describes them in words. From an accessibility perspective, this helps people using a screen reader; the screen reader will read the alt text to them so they understand what's being pictured.

During refreshes, we'll add alt text to images in the blog post itself, if it's absent. We won't awkwardly stuff the primary or related keywords in there if they don't fit, and you wouldn't want us to do that (it looks manipulative). But if we can add the keyword, we will — otherwise, we'll just add valid, helpful text.

Change Meta Description

In SEO parlance, the "meta description" (meta header tag with "description" property) is a short bit of text that you can use to tell the search engine what text you want it to show to describe a post. So if you look at the highlighted text here, you're attempting to get Google to show this text to searchers in the search results page (SERP).

I say "attempting" because in many cases (including this example) Google will opt to show other text from your article of its own choosing. But even if Google chooses something else, your specified description will show up in other places, such as a description of the article when shared on social media.

In refreshes we'll often modify this property if the search engine is ignoring it or if the one you've specified is non-compliant in terms of length or simply missing.

Change Meta Title

If you refer to the screenshot in the last section, "What is dev.to? A Guide for Marketers, Written by a Techie" is the meta title. In the case of that post, it also happens to be the editorial title of the post, meaning it shows up visibly at the top of the page. But the meta title and the editorial title aren't always the same. You can actually have a different H1 tag in the blog post than title.

If you want a quick rule of thumb, H1 title is what you see on the post, and the meta title is what shows up in your browser tab. Often times, the latter will have something like "- YourBrandName" after it, while your regular H1 title does not.

In refreshes, we'll occasionally change the meta title. We'll usually do this by simply changing the editorial title (most CMS-es default to using the editorial title for the meta title), but we might sometimes only change the meta title and leave the H1 title alone. In either case, we'll commonly do this when the title is misaligned with the primary keyword's search intent or if the meta title is not compliant (too long or too short).

Open External Links in New Tab

As a rule of thumb, we recommend opening external links in new tabs on your blog, and doing whatever you think your readers will prefer for internal links. The reason for this is that we generally don't want to tank time on page metrics, which is a search signal that can communicate how engaging your visitors find your content. In other words, we don't want to send people away from your site.

So we'll generally find external links during a refresh and set them to open in new tabs.

Remove Excessive Internal or External Links

Recall in the high authority link section that I talked about the importance of having a natural link profile, so as not to seem manipulative or strange? If you've got like 50 externa or internal links in your post that aren't part of your menu structure, that's weird. We'll tone it down a little on your behalf to keep your URLs from being suspicious.

Remove or Re-Link Non-200 Links

Any link on your page should ideally return an HTTP status code of 200, meaning success. In plain language, the links you have on your site should work. So we'll get rid of any links you have to pages with errors or pages that no longer exist, and we'll even clean-up redirect links (links that go to page A, which then sends you to page B) to link to their ultimate source (i.e. just link to page B).

Unlink/No-Follow Links to Competing SERP Entries

Sometimes you create a URL that links to another site targeting the same keyword. This is understandable from an editorial perspective: you're writing a blog post called "What is DevOps" and the first thing you do is say "WIikipedia defines DevOps as..." while linking to the Wikipedia entry.

Understandable, but not good. You don't want to link to a URL targeting the same keyword you are because you're telling the crawlers "this other site, and not ours, is where you really should go to know what DevOps is." The reason for that is that links convey authority.

So if we see you doing this, we'll either make the link a nofollow link or simply remove it.

Visible Hygiene

Visible hygiene interventions are interventions that a reader might notice, but probably wouldn't care about, since they tend to be minor and have little to no impact on substance and content, as far as the reader is concerned.

Bold definitions when they might earn featured snippet/AI mention

Crawlers look for semantic signals on your site to understand your content. You may be aware of the most common example of this, which is having a single H1 representing a title followed by a tree structure of H2s, H3s, etc. This gives the crawler a hierarchical sense of the article. Schema markup can also help toward this end.

But in-text cues can help as well. If you are writing a post or a section defining a term and you have a nice, crisp 1-2 sentence definition, bolding, underlining, or generally making that text stand out can be an aid for both readers and crawlers to show where you're creating a definition. Search/answer engines may then show this to searchers in the form of a citation.

Breakup "long" paragraphs

With organic search, scannability is the name of the game. Searchers will click on your URL and usually scan briefly through the headings to get a feel for whether they think the article will answer their question, only committing to read in detail once satisfied that it will. Toward this end, you want your URLs to feel approachable and scannable.

One of the things that tends to interfere with this is the perception of so-called walls of text. So if you have paragraphs longer than 3 sentences, we will break them up (and sometimes even 3 sentence paragraphs). Searchers genuinely don't mind this and even prefer it, even if it might make those traditional editors out there reading cringe a little.

Cleanup awkward formatting

If we notice anything off or amiss in the appearance of your conent (badly formatted code, errant characters, CSS issues, etc) we will clean that up for you while we're in there. This is only relevant to SEO insofar as searcher experience is relevant (which is "very"), but we always want to be improving searcher experience.

Consider adding ToC for a longer article

If your articles are starting to get north of 1,500 words, or especially 2,000+, consider adding a table of contents. This is a section at the beginning, or side, that has links to the different H2s and H3s on the page. This can be handy for situations where a searcher may only need parts of the article as reference, and not the entire thing.

Convert bullet lists to numbered lists

Part of the scannability concern mentioned in the breakup long paragraphs section is that you want readers/searchers to feel as though they're making progress when they read the content, and that they will make progress when they scan the content. Subtly, having numbered lists rather than bullets helps with this.

Convert dense lists to sparse H3s

Calling back to the wall of text issue in the breakup long paragraphs section, large, dense lists can have the same impact. ChatGPT generates content like this, and it can take the form of a bolded, brief sentence, followed by 2-3 more sentences, each in a bullet. This might seem scannable, but in particular on smaller screens, it's indistinguishable from a garden variety wall of text.

When we see this, we'll typically take the first, short, bolded part and turn it into an H3, and turn the rest of the bullet into a paragraph beneath it. This creates sparse H3s (just a single paragraph) but that's okay. Searchers don't mind this.

Create bucket brigades

I'm using the term bucket brigade a little differently than the average usage, I imagine. In the context of a refresh, what we do is identify a short, punchy sentence and add line breaks before and after the sentence so that it stands alone. For instance:

"THAT is the biggest challenge with regulatory compliance."

This prompts someone doing an initial scan of the article to be intrigued and want to read more. "Wait, interesting, what is the biggest challenge with regulatory compliance...?" This makes the text more scannable and engagement rates higher.

Number H3s in round-up H2s (e.g. "best practices" or "challenges")

If you have an H2 with a set of H3s below it and that H2 is something like "DevOps Adoption Challenges," we will number the H3s if they are not already numbered. Generally we will do this where the H2 calls out or implies some kind of "count noun" (best practices, challenges, steps, tips, etc).

The idea here is that numbering content creates more of a feeling of making progress on initial scan.

Remove Multiple H1s

If a URL has multiple H1s, it shouldn't. To crawlers, the H1 tag is the title of your article. The expected structure is a single H1, followed by a series of H2s, which might each have their own series of H3s (with H4s, H5s, etc). It's a tree structure with a single node — an H1 — at the top.

Violating this structure with multiple H1s is like giving the content multiple titles. The search engine doesn't know which to pick.

Rev post date

Assuming we've created a decent-sized diff graph in the refresh (not just adding a link or two), you'll want to rev the pub date on the article. You could leave the original publication date and have "updated on" as a secondary date if you want to play it safe. But our general rule of thumb is that you're good to go on changing the content's date if you've made substantive changes, and we try to ensure that our refreshes do that.

Update superficial, old dates

Old superficial dates would mean that you wrote a blog post in 2022 and said something like "These days in 2022..." If we're doing a refresh and you're just casually tossing out a date, we'll update that date along with the rest of the post.

An exception is historical or archival dates. Meaning, if in 2022 you were talking about something that happened in 2020, that's fine. It's okay for a current article to reference the past, and 2020 is the past, whether in 2022 or 2025.

It's also worth noting that non-superficial dates in an article might call for heavy content changes. If, for instance, a time-specific event were central to theme of the article (e.g. you were writing about how your company was currently handling Covid restrictions), then you can't simply change the dates because the post would make no sense.

Graphical

Graphical interventions are anything that involves adding or updating images in the post. Generally you want graphics for the sake of searcher experience, but also they serve as good ways to break up wall of text and make the content feel more scannable. Ideally, you'd have some kind of visual interest on screen at all times as the searcher scrolled, even just in the form of wide, minor graphical dividers.

Insert infographic / diagram relevant to post

If it's easy enough for our ContentOps folks to generate some kind of relevant infographic or diagram to the post, we can do that as part of a refresh.

Insert pull quotes

Pull quotes, done by our staff in Canva, are a great way to break up text and we're happy to create and add them. If this is something you want, the way this works is that you'll generally sign off ahead of time on one or more design prototypes and we use that template.

Insert stock graphic dividers

Graphic dividers, like the ones that Enov8 uses on their blog, represent anohter way to add visual interest and break up text.

Like pull quotes, if you have visual dividers you want us to use, we'll use those, or we can design prototypes for you to approve.

Product Marketing

Product marketing interventions are generally aimed at CRO efforts and involve adding calls to action (CTAs) to the URL.

Add graphical CTA

Like the graphical interventions, you would either supply us with graphic assets for a CTA, or we could template some out to use on your behalf. Once prototyped and approved, we would add the relevant, pre-planned CTAs to your post, interstitially, at the end, or both.

Add text CTA

A text CTA is just a simple call to action as part of the content of the post itself. Usually this is a sentence or two at the end, though sometimes it might make sense to have one interstitially.

Performance

Performance concerns are per-URL interventions that can improve site performance from a page load time and user experience perspective. Generally these are things that you would want to do any way to create good UX, but if page load times get bad enough, they can tank your rankings. A lot of these you'll need to take up with your web dev folks, but there are a few we can help with.

Compress large graphics

If you have excessively large graphics in the post itself, we can take them, reduce them in size and re-upload them for you, assuming we have CMS access. This is controllable and results in less data going back and forth across the wire.

Explicitly specify image sizes

Sometime, without realizing it, you'll upload a large image and size it in the CMS in a way where the entire image is sent over the wire, but the browser renders a smaller version of it. If we see that happening, we'll let you know and can work in the CMS on explicit image size specifications.

Technical

Technical interventions are ones that have to do with code, particularly in the data, security, and dev tools worlds.

Fix Code Formatting

If there is source code in your posts, it's common for that source code to be formatted in weird ways or not formatted at all. If you're going to show code on your site, you really want to give it a nice, clean appearance with syntax highlighting, often by using a plugin in popular CMS. Depending on what's wrong and if it's a per-URL concern, we can help you format the code.

Re-run and update tutorials

If your URL contains a tutorial written a while ago, we'll have a techie re-run the tutorial to verify that it still works and, if it doesn't, to tweak it and make it work.

Editorial

Editorial interventions are the ones that most people other than SEOs would naturally think of when it came to editing or "refreshing" a piece of content. These are interventions that involve adding or modifying content in the blog post, often in a non-superficial way.

Add "further reading" section at the bottom (if no widget exists)

This intervention is a pretty easy and low friction way to add some backlinks to your post. You'll commonly see someone throw an H2 at the end of the post called "Further Reading" and then simply link to other, related blog posts on the site. I generally only recommend this if you don't already have a "further reading" widget installed on your CMS. If you have both it looks weird.

Add external, relevant expert quotes

This intervention can serve as a two-fer, adding high authority externa links, if none exist. But the idea is that you add a bit of content and a link, break up the text a bit, and add to the general sense of authority of the blog post. We find a relevant quote by an industry expert and introduce it, either inline or often as more of a pull quote.

Add FAQ to target PAA long-tails

Another common editorial intervention is to add an FAQ section at the end of a post, particularly if the post is part of a content corpus like a glossary. But this can work for any post.

When you Google something, a widget called the "People Also Ask" (PAA) often appears with common questions related to the topic. If you click one of them, Google typically shows a brief answer, and offers a link to the content from which it pulled the answer (this is also true of some AI search widget citations).

To make your page more attractive to Google for this widget, the idea is that we identify a series of PAA questions that can be answered in 1-3 sentences easily, and then answer them in a FAQ section at the end of a post.

Add H2s/H3s from ranking competitors

This is the most consequential and common type of intervention, particularly when a URL is underperforming its expectations. Broadly, this follows the wisdom of "add more content, have a better chance of ranking," but we take a much more surgical approach.

When looking at a URL for refresh, we'll look at the PAA section as well as the top ranking URLs for the keyword to see what subjects they cover. We then make a list of subjects they cover that your URL does not and suggest working those into the post. This generally takes the form of added H2s and H3s.

Add interstitial "common mistakes" callout

Here, pull quote style, we'll add content of the form "common mistakes." What this looks like in practice would be sprinkling a few of these throughout, say, a guide or tutorial post of the form

"Common Mistake 1: DevOps is not a process; it's a culture. If you treat it like a process with a series of boxes to check and tools to install, you won't realize much improvement."

Add interstitial "interesting stat" callouts

This is the same as common mistakes, but with interesting stats.

Add interstitial "pro-tip" callouts

This is the same as common mistakes, but with pro tips.

Correct any obvious typos (not compliant with style guide)

If during the refresh we run across any obvious typos, we'll generally fix them unless you really don't want this for some reason. I'm not talking about judgement calls like Oxford commas or subtle issues, I'm talking about obviously misspelled wrods like the one in this sentence.

Insert a "quick summary" at top or bottom

This intervention involves adding a relatively short summary of the content, either at the top or the bottom of the post. This can help various crawlers understand the post at a summary level, and it also adds content and makes the diff graph larger with the refresh. Searchers can find this helpful UX as well, as long as it's done in a way that clarifies, rather than confuses.

Insert a "tl;dr" box with bullets, summarizing, top or bottom

This is a slight riff on the quick summary intervention, and you use bullets instead of prose. I've more commonly seen this done at the bottom, but you could really do it in either place. This format lends itself well to tutorials and guides.

Modify sections or paragraphs that are outdated or need to be elaborated on

This is a core part of any refresh intervention, and it's how you address non-superficial dates (contrast with the update superficial old dates section). Here we go through any sections of the post that are outdated and update those.

This really has to be addressed on a case-by-case basis, because how you treat this depends on the nature of the out-of-date information and how essentially it is interwoven with the post. But the general gist is preserving the evergreen parts of the content as-is, while updating the parts that have aged.

Remove problematic language (e.g. old "master/slave" references)

Here we're looking for anything that has aged poorly in terms of taste. The clearest example I can remember personally was some years back when Github made the decision to move away from terminology involving master and slave, a way of describing conceptual relationships that predated Github or git and had longstanding roots in electronics and computer architecture concepts. (I mention this to say that Github didn't themselves dream this up in like 2015 or something — I imagine this terminology originated in the mid-20th century)

In any case, Github updated this along with a growing, general movement away from the terminology. But if you have content on your site dating back a decade, it's entirely possible you have this language on your site without realizing it. If we see things like this, we'll bring them to your attention and confirm that you'd like them changed.