What Happens to An Article if it's Republished?

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   eugbugposted 20 months ago

   As you may remember, I copied and pasted an article to make a new duplicate article, then unpublished the original one. This was an experiment to see whether Google would consider it as completely "fresh" content as traffic for the original evergreen math tutorial had dropped slowly over 5 years from a peak of 1200 views per day to around 30 VPD. Now that experiment hasn't gone well. Traffic is only one or two views per day for the new version, even though it has been published four months. So I'm wondering what would happen if I republished the old version and unpublished the new version? Would I have lost the ranking on the old version by now? I don't like giving up on my experiment. Will Google now consider the old version a new version and the new version the old version?

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      Joshua Crowderposted 20 months agoin reply to this

      This would be an interesting test eugbug. I never really considered switching back but now I may save my older unpublished articles just in case.

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      DrMark1961posted 20 months agoin reply to this

      How are they even going to know it is the old one and not just another new one?

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         eugbugposted 20 months agoin reply to this

         I don't know. I can't understand why the old article got lots of traffic within 6 months or so and the new article is stuck with one or two views per day as though it's about something obscure and not popular.

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      Wellnes3 Wonderlandposted 20 months agoin reply to this

      Deleted
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   PaulGoodman67posted 20 months ago

   It's an interesting experiment. I've been reviving some old projects elsewhere with HP doing so bad.
   
   The power of the backlinks do seem to fade over time. An article revived quickly doesn't seem to suffer but there's a cut-off point where it's like starting from scratch. Where that cut off is exactly, I've never been sure of.
   
   All that said, some of your experiments do seem like rearranging the chairs on the Titanic, if I'm honest. Or fiddling while Rome burns. I'm not sure which metaphor is best, just that it's difficult to avoid the wider (dreadful) context.

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      Glenn Stokposted 20 months agoin reply to this

      I like both of your metaphors, Paul. The both relate well to the present state of publishing online.

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         PaulGoodman67posted 20 months agoin reply to this

         In times gone past, this time of year was exciting. Earnings would go up dramatically and there would be an Amazon windfall around Christmas time. That doesn't happen anymore.
         
         It's left me feeling fatalistic.
         
         It would be nice to think that there's a simple solution like unpublishing and republishing articles but I very much doubt it.

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            eugbugposted 20 months agoin reply to this

            Well my experiment seems to show that doing that doesn't work. Google only seems to like cool stuff. Fresh content = cool in their eyes. Imagine if universities recommended new course textbooks every year, even though they had decided previously on ones that were expert and comprehensive.

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               PaulGoodman67posted 20 months agoin reply to this

               I think "freshness" is just one factor among many that the Google algorithm considers. Freshness alone is unlikely to make an overwhelming difference in most situations.
               
               The reason that "freshness" gets talked about is that it's a relatively new ingredient that was added to the pot. Fifteen years ago, ranking was (almost) exclusively about backlinks and keywords. However, over time, Google's added many more factors to the mix and it's got much more complicated.
               
               I think it's more like, if all things are equal (backlinks, keywords, etc), freshness might tip the balance.
               
               I'm talking about general articles, not news, where freshness is more important.
               
               The topic also probably matters. Nobody generally cares if Google gives them a classic piece on the Franco-Prussian War but we want an up-to-date guide on hotels in Thailand if we're planning to holiday there. I think Google is attempting to reflect that.
               
               I studied Philosophy at university and there are texts that are over 2,000 years old and still relevant. However, the texts for computer programming can become archaic in less than five years.

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   Venkatachari Mposted 20 months ago

   Hmm. The HP staff may come up with their opinion. Let's wait and see.

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   eugbugposted 20 months ago

   From what I can make out, once an article is old, even the text is worthless as far as Google is concerned. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be an issue with republishing. Google "remembers" previously published content and permanently treats it as inferior and of no benefit in searches.

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      PaulGoodman67posted 20 months agoin reply to this

      "once an article is old, even the text is worthless"
      
      So old articles that still do well don't exist?
      
      I don't think that's the case.
      
      I think most niches/articles are doing badly here. But it's not generally related to "freshness," which is driven by Google wanting up-to-date info in searches.
      
      I still that the EEAT is the better explanation for why some articles/niches are doing well, even if the rest aren't.

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         eugbugposted 20 months agoin reply to this

         So why can I only get one view per day for an article that's a copy and pasted version of one that regularly got over a thousand organic views per day for 6 months? It's well below what articles on more obscure subjects get. If new maths articles do that badly, there's no point me writing any more. I still think the algorithm either is confused and is penalising it because of my attempt to republish or it's confused because of the change in URL. That's why I wanted to move it to Turbofuture, but the team won't reply to me.

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            PaulGoodman67posted 20 months agoin reply to this

            I don't think that the algo is confused. I believe that the entire niche is being punished.
            
            It may only be a minority of the articles in the niche that Google doesn't like. But that can be enough.
            
            This has been going on since Panda, when Google stopped treating articles as pure standalone and started assessing entire sites too.
            
            If that's the case, it's a mistake to focus on an individual article.
            
            It's not just that drawing universal conclusions from a single case is problematic, it's that the entire niche is clearly being punished, in my opinion, and therefore whatever you do with that single article might not make any difference.
            
            Not all niches are doing poorly and you might be right that it would do better in Turbofuture. But if you've already tried to get it moved, I'm not sure whether there's any more that you can do.

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               DrMark1961posted 20 months agoin reply to this

               I wonder if the answer is niche site subdomains? There is a lot of trash that gets moved to the niche sites that Google might recognize and those articles do lower the site authority.

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                  eugbugposted 20 months agoin reply to this

                  We had those before didn't we, but they were discontinued for some reason? Maybe it's time to revisit the idea.

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                     DrMark1961posted 20 months agoin reply to this

                     Yes, back before the niche sites. Overall I do not think they did well for HP and the niche sites do better. For some people (me, for example!) the subdomains actually did very well, perhaps because Google assigned page rank based on subdomains and did not downgrade an entire site.
                     
                     That was many years ago so I have no idea if HP would want to start this again. If this were my company I would definitely want to pick a few performers who did well in the past and try to use a subdomain and see if it effected page rank for them.

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   eugbugposted 20 months ago

   I've republished the old version and unpublished the new version. Let's see what happens now. the new version received 700 views in four months. The old version had 403,000 views in five years.

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   PaulGoodman67posted 20 months ago

   To be clear, I think we can do our best as individuals to maximize the quality/SEO of our articles, as far as Google goes. But it won't necessarily be enough because Google judges the whole site/niche.
   
   The quality of the entire niche has to be raised for a recovery.

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      eugbugposted 20 months agoin reply to this

      Meanwhile, I'm finding the recent algorithm has been reducing my traffic further.

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         PaulGoodman67posted 20 months agoin reply to this

         Yes, the October Core Update has made things worse than ever!
         
         Whatever HP's done so far, it's not enough to appease the angry gods! It's time to start sacrificing the chickens and build a temple to the Big G!

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            PaulGoodman67posted 20 months agoin reply to this

            There are apparently two updates occurring simultaneously but SERoundtable reckons it's the core update that's the main cause of volatility. I think every core update for the past two years plus has hit HP negatively.

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               eugbugposted 20 months agoin reply to this

               Yes, that's true. My traffic started on a downhill trend from June 2021. And that's even with 21 additional articles. It's lower again since this UA trend ended.
               
               
               

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                  PaulGoodman67posted 20 months agoin reply to this

                  It's not evenly spread across the niches, with some suffering worse than others, but there's no doubt that that's been the overall trend.
                  
                  Amazon hubs have been hit particularly badly over the last two years too, impacting my earnings disproportionately.
                  
                  While CPMs have not been good, the main problem has been a dramatic loss of traffic.
                  
                  I'm still around because I still earn from the site but I haven't been writing and publishing here much in recent times, although I do try to update and maintain my (older) material.

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