A guide to updating your old blog posts. You can triple your traffic instantly.

One of the first steps to creating adaptive content is becoming aware of the content you already have. This is why we encourage you to audit your site.

But before you dive into a full-blown comprehensive content audit, it might be possible to make your job a little easier by first dealing with all of the expired content.

What exactly is expired content?

It’s those old sales pages, obsolete product pages, and other outdated content. The pages you’ve forgotten about in your archives that desperately need some attention.

You’ll know where some of this content is off the top of your head. To properly attend to other pages, you may just have to walk through your archives.

Now, this might take an afternoon or longer, but as Sonia said in her article on content audits, there are a number of benefits to knowing what’s in your archives.

Why should you fix old, broken content?

There are a number of good reasons why you shouldn’t ignore old, broken, and neglected sections of your website.

Here are three benefits of attending to expired content:

Keeps your site light. True, the more pages on your site, the wider your reach in search engine traffic. But search engine bots will also require more bandwidth to crawl your site. As Stephanie Chang writes, “You don’t want to risk wasting your crawl allowance having bots crawl pages that are thin in unique content and value.” Keeps your site fresh. Expired and old information communicates to search engines (and your audience) that your site is stale.

Enhances the user experience. A well-groomed site enhances a user’s experience because he won’t stumble across inaccurate information or waste time reading two blog posts when one would suffice.

What exactly should you do with this content? You have four options for fixing each piece:

Leave it alone. If it’s still accurate and necessary information, then you might find good reasons to leave it alone. Did it earn a lot of inbound links? Continues to drive traffic? Then it might be worth keeping. However, the big disadvantage with this option is that traffic to stale content often bounces — and bounces hard — which ruins the user experience. I would suggest you leave expired content alone if it can’t be fixed with one of the options below. But more than likely you can find a way to improve it.Redirect it (301). This is the most sophisticated option, but it has to be done right. Do not redirect to your home page. Google hates it, and it drives visitors nuts. The goal with redirects is to point the expired page to another page that is as close as possible in style, intent, and category. You want to match the original user intent as much as possible with the new page. A redirect preserves any link juice, too. This process, however, can be labor intensive.

Delete it (404). This is the lazy man’s way to deal with expired content — and it’s a horrible idea. It wastes any incoming links, irritates the search engines, and upsets users (even if you do have ahip 404 page). Remember, 404 pages are appropriate for people who mistype a URL. They are not a way to deal with expired content.Improve it. This is hands down the hardest approach, but also the best. Look at a page and ask yourself, “How can I make this page better?” You might need to update a page if the information on the page is no longer accurate, or consolidate it with another page if you see an overlap in content between two pieces. Perhaps you need to update an outdated event or obsolete product page, instead of deleting them.