Most websites have pages that were written years ago, published, and never touched again. Those pages aren't sitting doing nothing in the background - they're sending negative signals to Google.
There’s a page on your website that you wrote in 2020 and have forgotten to update. Maybe it was a service page updated during the pandemic, explaining how you were operating under restrictions. Or perhaps it was a blog post about Covid-era advice for your industry. It was obviously necessary then, but someone forgot to make a note of it and the content is still live today.
That page is still indexed by Google and depending on what it says, it may be affecting your rankings in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.
Google looks at whether your content is current, accurate, and useful right now, not when you first published it. So if your content is still referencing restrictions that no longer apply, outdated statistics or broken links, then it is essentially telling Google that the page isn’t keeping up with the users who need it.
The specific problem with Covid-era content
Between 2020 and 2022, most businesses published content they’d never have written otherwise. They probably updated FAQs, changed opening hours, amended service information and wrote about what they were doing to support their clients/customers. But obviously times have (thankfully) changed.
While other content updates aren’t as obvious when they date, such as statistics or ‘latest’ reports, Covid information dates very specifically and conspicuously. It’s now been years since this information was relevant so anything about mask-wearing stands out immediately and sends a signal to Google and also your website visitors that the website is not kept up to date. A potential client or customer who finds references like this may therefore quickly leave your site. That sends a message to Google as well.
Why old content deserves more attention than it gets
The focus on content for organisations and businesses is often to produce something new. That means that you’re probably going to constantly be looking for new angles to write about, rather than returning to old content you already have. There’s a few reasons for this – it might be because when you wrote it, it was accurate and thorough so it got ticked off. Or because you think new content is more valuable. Perhaps you do have a genuine gap and you’re concentrating on filling that.
However, what was accurate and thorough once, might not still necessarily be the same way now. Especially when we look at in the context of Covid. Much of what we see with Covid content still up now wasn’t even relevant 9 months after the pandemic first began. Rules and regulations changed a number of times and often varied depending on the season and time of year it was. Another example is with AI. What you wrote about a few years before AI, could well be different now.
Several years ago we made a recommendation to one of our former clients that they write a series of guides around a particular topic, crucial to what they do. Those guides were some of their best performing pages for a while. But when I checked them the other day, they’re no longer appearing top of the results for the keywords we targeted. They also clearly haven’t been updated as the ‘latest’ annual report one refers to, was in 2024.
Statistics go out of date, best practice evolves and tools, platforms, and regulations change. If your website is no longer current, then being behind is enough to push it down. And whatever the reason for this, Google will be tracking the gap between what is on your page and what is currently true.
Where to start
The most practical starting point is a content audit – a review of what you’ve published and when it was last updated. Most businesses are surprised by what they find – you’ll likely find a number of references or outdated pieces you’ve forgotten about. The goal isn’t to delete everything old, as most of it can be updated rather than removed. Furthermore, an updated page with existing authority is often more valuable than something built from scratch.
The question to ask about each page is simple: is this still true or relevant, and would someone finding it today still consider it useful? If the answer to either is no, that page needs some work on it.
As always, we can help. A content audit will show you exactly which pages are working, and which are dragging your site down. We will also make recommendations for what you should do about each of them. Additionally, we can put together a strategy to help ensure you know what to do going forward and when. This will mean that in two to three years or even further in the future, you’re aware of what to update.
