How Often Should You Update Old Blog Posts?

Update your important posts on fast-moving topics every three to six months, give stable evergreen content a yearly accuracy pass, and refresh any post immediately when its rankings begin sliding. Frequency should follow page value and topic velocity, not a blanket rule.

Why freshness became a ranking factor you can feel

On topics where information evolves, Google visibly prefers current sources, and AI answer engines are stricter still: Perplexity and AI Overviews lean toward recently updated, clearly dated pages. A 2022 guide competing on a 2026 question loses to a maintained rival even with more links, and its decay usually starts quietly, position by position.

The refresh calendar that works

Tier 1, revenue pages on moving topics: quarterly reviews. Anything about AI, platforms, pricing, regulations or tools ages in months.

Tier 2, evergreen guides: annual accuracy passes: examples, screenshots, stats and dead links.

Tier 3, everything else: touched only when data says so, or consolidated away during pruning.

The decay signals that override the calendar

Position slides across two consecutive months, impressions dropping while rankings hold (SERP features stealing the click), a competitor’s fresher piece appearing above you, or your dated facts becoming wrong. Any one means the post jumps the queue.

What a real update includes

Changing the date without changing substance fools nobody and can hurt trust. A genuine refresh updates facts and numbers, answers the new questions People Also Ask now shows, tightens the answer-first structure machines quote, fixes links, and prunes sections the topic outgrew. Then the modified date updates honestly because the content did.

Should I update the publish date or show a modified date?

Show last-updated transparently and keep the markup’s dateModified accurate. Faking publish dates on unchanged posts is the kind of trick that works until it costs trust everywhere at once.

Is it better to update a post or write a new one?

Update when the URL has equity and the topic is the same; write new when intent genuinely differs. Splitting one topic across old and new pages usually just teaches them to cannibalize each other.

Refresh programs run inside Content Pruning & Decay Recovery, guided by Semantic SEO coverage maps.