What-s better? making new blogs or updating the previous one?

For instance, if you’re covering a news story that’s getting updates every few minutes or hours (like sports matches or supreme court hearings), what is better— writing new blog posts for each of such updates or updating the existing post with the new information?

If that’s what you meant, the answer is simple- you should update your existing blog post instead of writing a new one.

This is a good practice for many SEO and UX reasons.

If you’re going to cover only single (or few) updates of a story every hour, your content will come off as thin. And search engines dislike such contents. So, regardless of how much you optimize them, your blog post will usually rank lower.

Also, if you’re going to publish new blog posts every hour on the same topic but with individual updates, your readers will have to go from one post to other to keep track of the story. This isn’t good for their experience. To that, the homepage of your website will be plagued with thin and repeated story and updates. And this is NOT good for conversion.

Besides, publishing individual blog posts with a new set of information on the same story is kind of time-consuming, which isn’t good in any way.

So, instead of publishing new blog posts, update your existing ones. Just follow these simple measures to get a better result:

• Include “update” or a similar word to inform that readers that the post is updated or being updated on a regular basis.

• Where the date of your blog post goes, make sure instead of ‘Published/Posted on *date*’, it’s ‘Updated on *time and date*.

• Every updated information of this story must be in chronological order—with the most recent one being at the very top.

• Mention the exact time along with the updated information.

BUT, BUT…

This answer would be slightly different if you’re talking about bloggers who write on topics that aren’t as urgent as the one mentioned above.

For bloggers, whether to update an existing post or write a new one will depend on a range of things.

Repurposing an old piece of content depends on if the update is required at the very core or you just have to change few additional details here and there.

For instance, if you’ve written an article on content marketing and you have mentioned a few numbers and facts. Now, after months, those numbers and stats have changed. In such a case, you can repurpose the old content.

Also, say, back them your main focus was to attract new readers but now your focus is on to generate leads, even in that case, repurposing old content is okay.

But say, if you wrote an article on SEO that was based on Google’s Hummingbird algorithm update. But now following the Penguin update a large part of the way how you optimize your website for search engines has changed. In such a case, when the core of your article has to be changed, it’s always the best the idea to publish a new blog post.

Here’s what should be your major focus: provide the readers the best experience.

If you think publishing more new contents will help them and be more convenient to them, create new blog posts.

And if you think just updating your old content will make it more resourceful which the readers will find even better, update the old one.

It’s as simple as that.

Hope the answer helped. TC.