There’s three interesting things I’m going to share regarding the topic of this article. The first is that I actually wrote an article asking this very same thing back in 2012, titled Repurposing Your Own Blog Content; Good Thing Or Bad?, and a second one giving tips on how to do it titled 24 Ways To Repurpose Your Content – My Way!. Other than those two, I addressed the topic in a few different ways; the titles are:
Google Indexing And Older Blog Posts… Kind Of… (November 2023)
I’ve Lost Over 500 Articles; Why? (November 2023)
Repurposing Content From Other Blogs You’re Shutting Down (February 2019)
Taughannock Falls and Gorge, Ithaca NY
Right now, the two most important articles this one relates to are the first two, 500 lost articles and Google indexing issues; let me explain.
Many years ago, Google started tracking something they called GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation. It was a privacy regulation created by the European Union so that anyone from countries within that paradigm couldn’t be tracked, could ask someone to remove their information from blogs or websites, or have their information sold or scraped from the same two things above for monetary or sales purposes. Even though it had nothing to do with people in the United States, Google decided that’s exactly what they were going to do.
This created two problems for many of us bloggers, especially if we were somewhat proficient. One, any articles we produced after a certain date would have to follow those standards or your content would be blocked. Two, and this is the biggie… any articles you had on your blog from that point on that might go back in time via links or any other way one might be defined would also be blocked. I never found a specific date, and a lot of other people probably didn’t, but what did happen to me is that a lot of my content, around those 500 articles I mentioned, were blocked by Google’s search qualifications, meaning that they’d never be shown via search, topic or… well… if someone knew my blog’s name and popped it into the search box.
I’ll admit that I was royally irked because I’d used a plugin where I indicated which countries I didn’t want my content going to, which was almost all of them. The flaw in the plan is that spammers from those countries kept sending, and still do, bots and such, and truthfully there’s nothing one can do about the older content and the problems with spam wrecking the reach of my articles outside of the United States.
I went through a process of trying to reindex a great number of older articles, and Google brought some of them back into the mix, but not a heck of a lot of them. This means I still have an ongoing problem with the site, which was exacerbated during the time earlier this year when I had SSL issues with this blog and one of my other blogs. I had to change both of those links to HTTP, which means both blogs were considered unsecured and all of my earlier content was also unsecured. I also couldn’t do anything about that because once they were unsecured, I couldn’t get into them, even though I owned the domain names and the blogs themselves; ugh!
When I finally got back in, I tried reindexing all of my articles, but Google can’t find them for some reason; have I said “sigh” yet?
Well… reindexing is going to be a long term problematic mess. What’s left? Repurposing some of my previous articles of course.
I’d started doing that previously, and I can do it again. It might take a while to get a lot of it completed, but not as long as it took for me to write them in the first place. I’m also not going for “a lot” or articles either. Some of the topics I wrote about back in the day are no longer pertinent. Some of the articles that I want to repurpose might need me to secure the link via HTTPS and any other changes I might need to make here and there. To some, that might sound like it’s going to be time consuming, but to me it means I’ll be able to put out a lot of content that’s new to others, and might help this blog and my local blog prosper in search again (this blog used to be one of the top 75K websites in the world; sigh one more time… lol).
How will it all work in the end? No idea, but in my mind it’s something that might keep me interested in somehow creating a lot more new content. After all, years ago one of my blog posts was already over 3,000 words, and after I went back and cleaned it up it was over 5,500 words; I like challenges. 🙂
BTW, check out that initial article I wrote in 2012, when I first brought up the subject. There was only one person who wasn’t sure if she thought it was a good idea, but everyone else did. Also, since it’s not a repurposed article, the time limit for commenting on it is long gone, but for other articles I repurpose, whether I leave previous comments on it or not, will be published anew, opening it up to new comment and possibly commenters who previously commented; one never knows, right? 😉
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I have always been a fan of repurposing content, fits the work smarter, not harder motto.
Of course I haven’t been as diligent as I could be at doing things the way Google wants them so…
LOL! I’ve been fighting Google for over a decade, but that hasn’t worked in my favor all that much. Repurposing some of my content might help, and since they’re not indexing a lot of the older stuff, they’ll never notice whether or not it’s original or updated… right? 🙂